Psion Chess beat me!

[Sparky]

I used to play it in the 80s at level 7 all the time and almost always win.
Since last night, I've played over 15 games and lost all of them.
This is what happens when you cross the 50 years old mark unfortunately...

[bluespikey]

I learnt from Artic chess, and could sometimes beat it as a 9 year old. I loaded it up and lost in 7 moves

[Sparky]

It's uncanny and frustrating...

[TMD2003]

Think yourself lucky. The only computer chess game I know I've beaten is 1K Chess on the ZX81...

[stupidget]

What's the best speccy chess game for learning chess? I have a very (and I mean, VERY) basic understanding of chess, but would like to learn more on the strategy side of things and how to plan moves.

[CaptainKrenon]

Psion Chess is quite weak, I was already able to beat it when I was a kid with almost no chess experience.

That said, maybe it's not a bad program to start because it can be strong enough to beat you if you're inexperienced, it certainly plays better than some of my friends You can start with that one until you feel comfortable that you can beat it easily.

Apart from Psion Chess, the one that I know the most is Colossus 4, which is actually really nice in terms of user interface, options, etc., the best one for the Spectrum in my opinion. It can suggest you moves, it can solve puzzles, you can see what moves the computer is considering when you play against it, and you can tweak a lot of parameters.

You will need to check the manual to see all the options, it really has plenty of features. You also need to read the manual in order to disable the 3D view, which is not good.

So Colossus is in my opinion the best one in terms of features, design, etc., but if you are looking for the strongest one you can also check this thread: viewtopic.php?p=51543#p51543

Now, having all that said, if you actually want to learn chess nothing on the Spectrum can compare to the amount of resources you can get from a modern chess website. Have a look at lichess.org, it's free, it has lots of tutorials, puzzles, and players of all levels, from extremely inexperienced ones to grandmasters. It's a really really great place to learn and play chess online.

[SteveSmith]

It would be very interesting to play all the chess games off against each other.

[Einar Saukas]

It would be very interesting to play all the chess games off against each other.

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=3755

[PeterJ]

Possible idea for the Spectrum Show [mention]PaulJ[/mention] ?

[PaulJ]

Possible idea for the Spectrum Show @PaulJ ?

Yes, if someone could create a method to do it easily.

I have no idea how to play chess!

Geoff and I have chatted about this before..

[Pegaz]

It would be very interesting to play all the chess games off against each other.

Well, my friends, it's not an easy task at all.
More than a decade ago, my fellow countrymen did the most comprehensive tournament among Spectrum chess programs.
It took him three months to complete this ambitious task, but results are much more credible than all the other comparisons I have seen.
Here you have all the details of the tournament, where you can get an insight into what kind of endeavor it was.
https://worldofspectrum.org/forums/disc ... ent_423883

I certainly support any similar chess event, but I doubt the final results would be much different from these.

[Van_Dammesque]

Hi [mention]PaulJ[/mention],
I can help with this (I watch all of your Spectrum Show episodes! Anyway enough of this sycophancy!) I play chess everyday and play at club level.

EASY PART:
The setup I would use would be:
- make a list of ZX Spectrum chess games.
- Randomly select the games to play each other.
- Let the games play each other as black and white. Repeat three times, so six games in all. Per round, then into a playoff situation. Draws might be a bit trickier if the programs aren't programmed for it, or if they play repeating moves (which automatically ends in a draw, again might not be programmed for). Draw by points - play a one off 'deathmatch'; toss a coin to see who plays as white.
- The practical implementation would be to manually enter the moves into each emulator so it would be Player 1 Vs CPU (Player 1 is really the other chess program in the other emulator).

HARD PART:
- Now the hard part: how to limit each game so it is fair (e.g. one game might have 30 mins thinking time compared to another game which may not limit itself by time but by how 'deep' the analysis is.) A long classical game of chess, each side has 90 mins each, typical club level games can be shorter, 45 mins to 30 mins. If we say an average chess game has 50 moves (that goes the distance to the end game) then we can see that a one or two minutes per move is fine. For the games with depth rather than limited by time you can time a move on a the middle game (openings would not be a true reflection as the game may have a openings database and so will play moves rather quickly).

FOR THE EPISODE:
- Record the emulator screen for the videos or copy the moves to a modern chess program (such as chessbase which is free, and generate a PGN file which simply text based file recording the moves) and show a selection on the videos. Possibly with commentary of the pertinent moves aka Agadmator style (a chess commentator on Youtube).


Food for thought.

[Patrik Rak]

Now, having all that said, if you actually want to learn chess nothing on the Spectrum can compare to the amount of resources you can get from a modern chess website. Have a look at lichess.org, it's free, it has lots of tutorials, puzzles, and players of all levels, from extremely inexperienced ones to grandmasters. It's a really really great place to learn and play chess online.

I would also like to point out that the Chessmaster has a pretty nice series of tutorials starting from complete beginners. I remember having Chessmaster 8000 and learning from those tutorials made much more sense than all the chess books my father gave me before. Those were always just rules how each figure moves, then immediatelly chapter about several recommended openings and then jump straight into dozens of games from which one was supposed to learn, but with very little explanations. Incomprehensible for my teen self. But the Chessmaster started with explaining everything, including all the possible ways to start the game, including the bad ones, and explaining why it is bad, before moving on in depth for those openings which made sense. Very well made. And there are other chapters which I enjoyed a lot, like Psychology of Chess. The engine might not be the best (which doesn't bother me at all, as it can beat me any day anyway), but IMO the tutorials themselves are worth it on its own.

That said, being released by Ubisoft, you may struggle getting it working on todays machines. I have purchased the Grandmaster Edition long time ago, IIRC it was pain to get it working back then with their insane patch-release web site, and not sure if it even works today... I should try some day.

Patrik