Author: Marc Lacrosse
Date: 15:04:32 12/27/05
After two rounds, the one and only program with a perfect score was not even mentioned on his list of favorites by any of the nine participants to this morning's poll : it is SpikeX ... And if we have a short look at the (former) favorites : 1. Zappa has 1.5/2 but this should be 1.0 without a win on time in a drawn game against Fruit. Zappa had an incredibly weak choice of opening in his two games. Is he really playing with Erdogan's book ? Where are the monster calculation performances announced ? Zappa's middlegame play was weak in both games. 2. After a nice win in round 1, rybka suffered a terrible well-deserved defeat from spike in round two. After his initial king-side attack fired out, rybka went into a horrible bad-bishop affair. If I had to rate positional skill of both progs my first impression is that spike was at least 200 points over rybka in this game (but i did not yet analyse it carefully). And there is also this strange story of Jeroen Noomen proudly announcing that he will cook the book for Rybka followed by Rybka actually playing with a book provided by Djordje Vidanovic ... 3. Fruit makes an incredible appearance if we read its team's comments: Joachim Rang : "We participate in Paderborn this year just as a "supportive player" and have no ambitions" (message 474181) R Benitez (message 473945):"It is just unfortunate timing. Some big changes are on the way and some even working right now but it is better to test results fully before using the newest changes". In fact Fruit plays with the version that was used at the dutch open and which was only marginally superior to the october commercial one. No improvement in almost three months ? But why are they playing then? Seems a bit masochistic ... In its first game fruit went for a marginal opening line which abandoned any winning prospect as soon as move 6 and the game was drawn. In its second game Fruit dared to play a dutch defence against Zappa. This almost gambling choice proved excellent as Fruit got a slightly superior (probably drawn) middle game position but finally lost on time. I am wondering who choosed these openings for Fruit with such a poor choice in game one and an interesting one in game two... 4. Finally I feel that shredder will do better than most thought. First game win was clean. The second round defence against Gandalf was tough but Shredder emerged with a good half-pont against an underestimated opponent. So everything is open, and I am pretty sure that a new poll should at least include spike and gandalf. Nice! Your opinion ? Marc
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