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5 Best Ways To Train Your Mind With Chess Engines

by Ravi Sharma 06 Sep 2022 1 comment

A chess engine is computer software that helps to play chess. We are lucky to live in a time where the strongest chess engines are ranked several hundred points higher than the world chess champion ranking system. 

The best thing about chess engines is that you can download easily some of the prime chess engines for free. In reality, the strongest chess engine today is Stockfish, which is a free chess engine.

One can buy handmade chess sets from Staunton Castle while practicing through some authentic chess engines. 

An excellent way to improve your skills is to analyze the game with the support of chess engines. Installing a chess engine can help us to improve the game in many ways. 

Let's read more to know how it can help to train our minds. It can reduce your stress levels and make you prepared for upcoming challenges. Chess engines can surely develop the highest playing strength in you. 

Enhance Your Opening Game With Chess Engines

If you are busy traveling you must download, Stockfish or Chess-Play & Learn on your smartphone. It is a wonderful way to improve your opening game. The app is known as small fish as well, and you can play a game with one color on the way to work and the other color after work.

In Chess-play & learn, here you can see the game of many experienced chess players and collectors as well. 

The perfect time setting is 15 minutes with a 10-second increment (15/10). The idea is to practice your opening game and reach an early middlegame position.

Despite the fact, that the prime focus of your is to play through the rest of the game. And to see if you can learn some tips from the chess engine. The chess engine's blueprint might suit your style of play, and after you can use it in an over-the-board game.

It is not that you always win the game, truth is that you can lose all the games. Rather than get disheartened you will gain confidence in yourself. 

Playing with a stronger opponent you can become wiser and at the end become a stronger player. The chess engine will assist you to learn how much you understand about the opening of the game.

Make Your Middlegame and Endgame Skills Better

Using the same time control, 15/10, practice playing positions from your games. It is extremely hard in chess to convert winning positions.

The interesting thing that might surprise you is that a chess engine will find lots of exceptional defensive resources in the position. You can also try the different alternatives until you manage to win the game.

There are also games in the chess engines where the world champions play intellectual games from where one can get knowledge and experience.

 A simple piece of advice for you is that if you watch the games of these great players do make notes. It is really fun to see how the chess engine plays the attack and how it plays defensive game. The best part is you have the original game series from where you can learn a lot. 

If you cannot defend against the chess engine, see what strategy and principles are being used. Will it provide an advantage to one of your overloaded pieces or divert a piece from a crucial defensive square?

Upgrade Your Analyzing Skills

Use this training method when you have time to learn and apply on your game. Allow the chess engine to play for two or three minutes per move and then you can play a correspondence game.

In this training exercise, you will take your time to analyze all variations on your own. Keep all your analysis because if one strategy does not work, you can always return and try another variation.

By spending your time and practicing analyzing a position deeply, you will certainly gain experience. This experience will help you select your soldier's moves while playing in the tournaments. These training method works great while using shorter time controls.

Top-Notch Chess Engines

These five chess engines display a good collection of playing styles. Finding one that plays in a similar style to you will help you feel comfortable with the suggestions it makes.

There is no point in choosing the strongest or highest if you find yourself in positions. 

It is incredible to know that even if you choose any engine, it would have an Elo higher than any human chess player.

Stockfish Chess Engine

The highest-rated Stockfish is the most well-known chess engine which is a staggering 3925 Elo. You can download this app on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

You can also get the Stockfish chess engine for your smartphone and tablet only you need to uninstall GUI. For the iOS store, this app is known as SmallFish.

At the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC), StockFish is the eleventh-time winner which including first place in the TCEC League Season 22, that held from January 2022 until April 2022.

Komodo Dragon 3

Komodo Dragon 3 is a powerful chess engine and runner-up to  Stockfish in the TCEC League Season 22. You can change the setting from default to personalize one which suits your playing style.

Some of the settings available include active, positional, aggressive, defender and human which allows you to train with a chess engine.

Another way to learn from the chess engine is to play in a style that you find challenging to work for. For example, if you are a positional player who finds it challenging to oppose an aggressive player, you can play practice games against this personality. 

Fat Fritz 2

This chess engine is a well-known AlphaZero algorithm. It is Ai technology to regular computers without needing expensive graphics cards.

Learning is one of the main selling points of this chess engine. Whether it is a new opening repertoire or to improve your all-around chess game, Fat Fritz 2 will certainly help you get better. A lot of the features included were designed to help you learn.

Revenge 3.0 Chess Engine

According to the latest release, the Revenge chess engine still has an impressive Elo rating of over 3700! It brings a balanced approach and the two previous versions were more attack orientated.

You will need a GUI to run this chess engine, and also get the free options including Winboard, Arena, and Banksia. It features "reverse futility pruning," which prunes moves that do not significantly improve the position.

Houdini 6.0 Chess Engine

Houdini is a commercial chess engine that is designed for windows. If you own a Mac you need wine for the operating system which is Linux and a virtual machine. In its upgrade version, there are better evaluation, search, and time management.

Houdini 6.0 Standard is suitable for most users, and the Pro version is better if you have a high-end computer.

To Conclude

One thingh for sure you must not become dependent on it for your thinking process. No doubt the chess engines can provide you a valuable aid.

First, analyze your games on your own or with a training partner, then turn on the chess engine and compare your scores.

To take your game to the next level using the chess engines wisely. Keep in mind, A chess engine might suggest positions you are not comfortable with while playing through its excellent calculating ability. So don't scare to play the second or third best line the chess engine suggests if you are more comfortable playing the position.

For such kind of more interesting blogs visit our website www.stauntoncastle.com

Buy Hand Crafted Chess Sets & Pieces Here

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1 comment

20 Dec 2023 Angelo
Why does fat fritz plays a 3 minute or 5 minute game undecided. It actually hunts for the best move and then changes it mind and play another move, I thought it might be me not having enough ram, so I upgrade from 16mg to 32mg of ram, and it’s still taking a long time in most positions, and last second changing move. Why???

Is it because the processor speed is 3.7 hz. Iam running on a ryzen 3900×...?

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