Play with Coach (Proposed feature from Pascal Georges)

Phalanx is a chess engine which understands the xboard protocol. It's suitable for beginner and intermediate players. It can be configured to run fairly weakly, with a fixed ELO, which can be changed from 1000 to 2200. When playing at an ELO of 1000, it will make lots of blunders. ChessDB has a feature, developed by Pascal Georges, where one can play the relatively weak Phalanx chess engine, whilst a stronger engine such as Crafty checks for blunders made by Phalanx.

To use this mode, two engined must be configured. One must be a modified Phalanx engine, which is distributed as part of ChessDB. Crafty works well for the second engine, although others may work, but have not been tried.

Two engines must be configured - 4 shown

Note that the Phalanx engine used must be the one delivered with ChessDB as it is a version slightly modified. Then using the Tools , select Play with coach. You will see this dialog. You will see this dialog, where you configure the two engines :

Configure the coach game

The engine on the left must be Phalanx. The engine for analysis shown is Crafty, which is a good choice.

The level of difficulty is at 1500 ELO : this is the level of play that Phalanx will use - not the coach engine.

In order to limit CPU usage of the analysis engine, you can give it a limited duration to check for blunders.

If you want to play white, then you start playing by simply clickon on Play. If you want to play black then rotate the board first.

Phalanx has blundered

A window appears aside the chessboard. In the example above, if Phalanx blunders, it will be displayed with the blunder value (that is the variation of the score between two moves of your opponent). Here whites have a score of 1.5 and latest move of the opponent weakens its game by 0.7 (if it was 0.3 it would not be displayed because here a move is a blunder if the position is weakened by an amount of 0.4).

When Phalanx makes weak moves they will be marked in the PGN window with ?! (dubious move), ? (poor move) or ?? (blunder) depending of how poor the move is.

If you would like to contribute to the tutorial or see anything that should be updated, corrected or improved, please contact David Kirkby. But please note David only speaks English.


Valid HTML 4.01 Valid CSS!
Website administered by Dr. David Kirkby
This page was last modified: September 16, 2007. 10:41:41 am GMT