Author: Steffen Jakob
Date: 03:51:01 01/21/02
Here are my notes about the first rounds. I haven't had the time to look closer at the games so I only can get you a short impression. Before CCT4 I made a lot of changes in elementary parts of Hossa. Although I think that those changes are a step in the right direction they made Hossa play much worse (that always happens if I do this). I tried desperately to fix but I wasn't successful. Short before CCT4 I decided to go back to the version of Hossa from december which seemed to play reasonable and which got Hossa's blitz hiscore at ICC. This was of course easy because I use CVS :-) I merged some evaluation improvements from which I think that they are 100% safe improvements (hmmm). After I saw the participants list I was rather pessimistic (and still am). So many strong engines and most of them are running on very fast hardware. Hossa was seeded #32 and was the first who ran on a machine with less than 1 GHz. Well, at least this gives me a good excuse :-) Then finally the tournament started! Round 1: Insomniac - Hossa (1-0) Again I had a tough opponent in the first round. So far my first opponents in the previous CCTs were Nimzo, Crafty and Shredder. Against Nimzo Hossa had a winning position which he blew because of a permanent brain bug. Against Crafty he was able to draw and from Shredder he lost in an honourable game. So it was time to get smashed. After asymmetric castlings Insomniac managed to push his h pawn to h6. Hossa played 20... Bg5 after which the c file was opened. But as a result he lost a pawn. Although Hossa thought he had some compensation he lost in the end. Round 2: Hossa - Djenghis (1-0) After the noise about this engine I played a match at ICC between Hossa and Djenghis a day before the tournament and saw that the 1800 rating was real. So my hope was of course to win that game. Djenghis played a dubious opening and already after move #7 Hossa had an eval of +1.3 which quickly grew to something like +3. At move 20 Djenghis decided to start a king attack. That means he attacked with his king who went e4. It was a one way ticket. Round 3: Sjeng - Hossa (1-0) I was happy to play Sjeng because this is another Amateur who grew up at ICC. Something funny happened at the beginning. I chatted with Sjeng's operator. After about 10 minutes the operator spoke to my surprise in 3rd person of Gian-Carlo Pascutto. Til then I thought I had spoken to GCP! Well, then I remembered that Sarah Bird was operating. A mistake which wouldnt have happened in real life! ;-) In this game a bug or better a bad concept in chosing the book move made Hossa leave its book created from GM games although he had enough games left (I fixed this after that round). This happened in a crucial phase of the game. The opening was a gambit and white got more than enough compensation. Hossa lost chanceless. Round 4: Hossa - Qalat (1-0) Again I didnt know much about this opponent. After the first moves it was clear that Hossa was outsearching Qalat. But the position was rather blocked and for a long while no progress has been made by both sides. In move 61. black opened the position with 61... cxd4 and Hossa got a fail low! I wasn't surprised because Hossa really sucks in endgames although I made some improvements in rookendgames... and this was a rook endgame. After some moves Hossa recovered and managed to create a passer at e6 and to get some active rooks. After a short while the game was won for Hossa. Nevertheless Qalat gave a tough fight in this game. Round 5: Hossa - Tao (0-1) This was terrible! It was an execution of Hossa. Around move 12 I brought my son to bed. After I have read out a fairy tail I returned to my computer and saw the mess. Hossa was already lost. "grep 'failed low' hossa.log | wc --lines" returned something like 30. In move 28. I had seen enough and resigned. I better had read a second fairy tail. My son would have loved it and I didnt have to suffer so much. Round 6: PolarChess - Hossa (0-1) Hossa started round 6 with ... Armageddon! Then we had to abort because a mistake in the pairings has been made. Armageddon managed to get a draw from Arasan in that round so maybe I had luck that the games has been aborted. My new opponent was PolarChess. He played the scottish gambit and Hossa was immediately out of book. I was very scared because Hossa isn't very good in defending against gambits which has been proven in round #3. I was happy that white didnt get much initiative. The queens were exchanged quickly and Hossa had a won position which he managed to win safely. My conclusion after the first half of the tournament is that Hossa won against opponents which are prob. weaker than Hossa and lost from opponents which are stronger. So the result so far is ok considering that Hossa is in a good company with engines like Yace, Hiarcs, etc. Like in all CCTs before I learned a lot and it was great to have all these people around. I am looking forward for the next weekend! Best wishes, Steffen.
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