Chessmaster XI: Me vs Josh - Age 6

Hi everyone!
So today I played a rated game against Josh - age 6 on Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition and would like to get your thoughts on it.
This is my personal analysis:

Josh played d5 in response to e4. This unusual opening (Mieses-Kotroc) confused me a bit. I captured the pawn to get a development tempo, with him bringing his queen early. I thought it would be easy to win after this, but disaster happened.

I guess one of my first mistakes was 5.Be2, because the bishop got locked on that square. Later on, 8.Nh4 was also a bad choice (I thought it would be good to capture his bishop and get him doubled pawns, but the open h-file annoyed me for the rest of the game).

At 17.Bxg5 I was a pawn up but very frustrated with my position. Trading bishop with  knight was terrible because Josh's queen got really dangerous.

5. Be2 is fine but I think d4 is better as you don't yet know where black will develop his light squared bishop. e.g. if 5. d4 Bg4 then Be2 is called for.
The mistake was 7.d3 instead of d4 keeping bishop lines open and controlling the center. If I felt like being novel maybe even Nd4>b2 has it's reasons.

8. Nh4 > Nxg6 is incorrect. It wastes a move to consider exchanging for the bishop. Blacks doubled pawns are not a weakness since you have no lines for attack. Black gets an open h-file for his rook to your king.

By move 10 my general plan would be to have both bishops on the h2-b8 & h1-a8 diagonals -> this eyes on the likely castled position of blacks king. Then work on gaining Queenside space... you focused too much on the discovered attack on queen tactic.

12. g3 and Kg2 don't make sense to me... you wanted that diagonal for the bishop too much and weakened a kingside that already has attacking lines aiming at it.

18. Be3 if your going to exchange, you should prefer to be the player doing the recapture (since it activates your Queen). Also I think the black bishop is doing the more active role then the knight... since your e2 bishop covers the knight squares (also the knight can be chased away from e5 via f4 later)

by 20. Bd3 is better than f3.
f3 deactivates the bishop, leaves the e-pawn pinned, gives the black bishop lines to your king.
Bd3 unpins the e-pawn, closes down a position thats under attack.
I think even Re1, sac-ing the pawn, followed by Bf3 is worth a thought. 
I think the open h-file already means whites game is over eg 20. ... Rd7 > Rh7

Thanks for your analysis Jex_Roselin.
I now realized that the dark square bishop was much stronger than the knight.

The reason I played Kg2 was to unpin f2 pawn and later be able to play f3 or f4.
12.g3 was to avoid Qxh2#.

 Did you see any mistake by Josh that i could exploit?

In summary... a few innaccuracies, no blunders.
Your position wasn't strong enough to take advantage, but I hope some of the commentary helps. 

Thanks a lot!
When I beat him I'll post it here.

Here's some FM/GM level games

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1103205
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1472106
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1540318 
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1117122
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1765037 

Take a quick look, get a feel for the opening and how to play against g4 bishop. It's a good club level opening for black, more uncommon for white to play against.

btw I just played Josh, just play a solid game, he'll eventually start making blunders towards the endgame. 

Hi Marcelo,

I just thought I'd mention that, while the Josh Age 6 personality has a stated elo of 1200, my testing shows it's probably closer to 1400 elo. See Post #95 in this thread:

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/chessmaster-biggest-load-of-crap-ever?page=5

So don't get too discouraged if you have a hard time beating the personality.

So usually in this opening white gets a good center control with d4, chases the light square bishop with g, h pawns and goes for the queenside castle?

Hi EscherehcsE,

I can't belive it hahaha
Is it common to have underestimated personalities on chess programs?
Because I had a really hard time trying to beat Marius until I read this:
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/545055-Caught-between-a-Berry-and-a-Marius!-Forums
 

Yep, it's very common with dumbed down engine personalities. The people who create these personalities don't really have the time to properly test the strength of the personalities, so they run a few games and then make a guess at it. It's not surprising that the guess is often too high or too low. The Chessmaster manual claims that the personality ratings are within plus or minus 50 elo points, but proper testing will show that that's sometimes not true.

Early blunder by Josh, not worth evaluating imo.
It makes sense Josh's rating would be deflated, he wants to feel like the tough opponent, being part of the Chessmaster team n all. xD

That last game was a pretty bad one by Josh. Just to be on the safe side, you have installed the two patches for the program?

No I didn't. Once chessmaster requested an update or something. I don't know if that's what you mean.

Yeah, that was probably it. I don't have CMXI, but I've heard it should auto update the patches. If the version is 1.02, then it has the two patches. If not, then you'd need to manually install the patches.

I ran another engine match in Arena, this time only between CM10 Josh Age 6, and Delfi Trainer 5.4 elo 1400. It went for 200 games, and Josh rated about 1385 compared to Delfi. (The margin of error was plus or minus 23 points.)

However, I did notice that the quality of Josh's games was quite variable. Sometimes it would play a nice, strong game, and sometimes it would drop a piece or two, or sometimes even a queen. So the last game you posted was probably just one of Josh's bad games.