Chessnut Go + Chessiverse | Beer and Scotch (Game) at Rising Sun Workshop! ☺️♟️🍺
#chessnutgo #chessiverse #chessconnect #scotch
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Today, I decided to take my Chessnut Go portable electronic chess board with me to the Rising Sun Workshop, a brilliant local café/restaurant with a motorcycle workshop downstairs! I had a lunch of ramen, and then played a quick game against the next AI-powered bot on Chessiverse on my Chessnut Go, connected through Chessconnect! This time, I had the game set as 10+0 rapid. 🍜🍺🤤♟️
I had the black pieces, and my opponent “Ray” played what seemed to me to be an unusual line in the Scotch Game (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 exd4 4. Qe2?). I’d never seen it before. When I looked this up afterwards in analysis on the Lichess community database, it has previously only occurred in about 1 in 30,000 games from the position, so very rare indeed!
The bot was nominally rated at an ELO of 920, so, it should play like a beginner player. What I wanted to see was whether they indeed played in a way that “felt human”, or at least, human-ish.
I was actually fairly impressed! The bot spent time “thinking”, and although I knew that this was all a clever simulation, it was possible to imagine that a thinking mind was behind some of the (not great) moves. For instance, “Ray” spent some time thinking before playing Qe2 as if they didn’t know any more Scotch game theory and were trying to decide their next move.
I narrate in the video that it seemed like Ray had some tactics planned with their suboptimal moves, and this bore out several times. This contrasts with more typical weakened bots where suboptimal moves often seem quite random and lack a sense of move-to-move coherence.
And then lastly, when I put some pressure on Ray’s queen with (11… Bg6), the bot blundered their queen in a believable way; they captured a piece not recognising that it was defended by a knight! This is a common rookie mistake, and furthermore, Ray immediately resigned when their queen was captured! 😲
My verdict? Pretty good! Although I still think that (4. Qe2) is statistically a weird move to play, the bot justified it in a human-ish way. It fits well with the beginner theme of attempting an early queen attack, it not being very effective, and then flubbing it when the queen is put under pressure. But what do you think? I’m keen to know your thoughts in the comments below!
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