Check out Glinski's Hexagonal Chess, our featured variant for May, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Sep 27, 2012 09:06 AM UTC:
> The increased knowledge of mating potential has raised the apparent value
of Commoner, then?

It seems so. To be frank, I am not entirely sure if the previous value
determination was for 8x8 or 10x8 board. I did a lot of 10x8 measurements
for Great Shatranj, where Commoner is one of the pieces. I also remember
having done some tests with divergent K+N combinations, though, and that
was most certainly on 8x8. But I remember I also found then that 3 of the 4
combinations were equal, and only mNcK was 50cP stronger. [Edit] I looked it up, and the conclusion then was that Commoner was 30cP weaker than Knight. So in that case good handling of the mating potential does seem to have a significant effect. Perhaps I should redo these tests with various aspects of the new knowledge disabled, to see what helps most. [End Edit]

The Knights vs Commoners match is now at 777 games, and the lead of the
Commoners has dropped to 6 points. Which is an excess of only 0.4%. Against
a standard deviation of 1.4%, so totally insignificant.

After 338 games the B-pair vs Commoners is at 57.4%. The excess of 7.4%
(+/- 2.2%) is exactly half of the 15% Pawn-odds score I remember from the
previous version of Fairy-Max. This also points to exact equality of Knight
and Commoner, as B-pair is also worth 50cP more than Knights. (Kaufman
values, confirmed by my tests with the old version. Which in this case
should not matter much, as neither B nor N have mating potential, and
drawing tricks based on KNNK are excedingly rare (plus that Fairy-Max is
not likely to be able to win KBNK either, not knowing in which corner to
drive the bare King)).

Next I will probably do B-pair vs Commoners + Pawn, to check if the sore
eactly reverses. (Doing an implicit determination of the effect of Pawn
odds at the same time as more Bishops vs Commoners comparison.)

Edit Form
Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.