✗ NCV ︱ Bottleneck Chess

Why is cga not instant

I don't know. It's pretty weird.

finally

Wtf

It seems to me that this version is better than the previous one.

Here some test games:

https://www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/29461380/86/1
https://www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/29461535/89/3
https://www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/29461667/90/1
https://www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/29461805/80/3
https://www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/29461887/136/1
https://www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/29462059/120/3

Why is cgabot making the Open Testing be Game of Points? None of my test games were game of points. If that works, then I guess that's okay, but I'm confused.

It’s a bug; however I think with the limited number of pieces in this variant it in theory shouldn’t impact testing too much; CGAs will definitely make sure to test with the correct rules

Okay, sounds good.

Behind bottleneck? Well, all the pieces are bottlenecked as they try to get through these three holes. Everything gets funneled rather than being able to roam wherever they want.

If the CGAs want to leave the Game of Points, I'm fine either way. I could foresee points being helpful to avoid draws or something.

Any word on this? It's been a week, and I haven't heard anything from the CGAs yet.

Thanks for posting your decision.

Could you please post the games where you guys came to a draw so that I can analyze them and improve the variant?

Thanks.

I wouldn't really look at testing games of the CGA team as a valuable resource: we rarely always play the optimal moves, most of time at least one of us throws/ignores a win on purpose as to test some aspect of the game.

https://www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/29546222/61/1

Take this one for example: BoxJellyfishChess could have easily moved away the knight and it would be a trivial draw, yet we decided to test whether a rook advantage was enough.

Now, as per the variant: there exists a misunderstanding that "drawish = forced draw", and that's not fully accurate. There's nothing wrong with having a forced draw, but if any 1700 can force a draw against any 2300, that's unacceptable. Here, it is done trivially by guarding the 9th rank of promotion.

So, let me elaborate on the game issues more in-depth:

1. Bishops are useless for attacking a strong player, and are too strong for defending your position. How to fix this? Well, firstly replacing the bishops with let's say Dragon Bishops would help a lot, but this is still not even nearly enough.

2. The next one is the lack of interesting openings, and this one is hard to fix. Just removing two central walls is not going to help, so you'd need to remove two central walls, re-arrange the pawns and have let's say for example random starting position generation, like in Paradigm Chess30 for example. Opposite-side castling will also really help here in this case.

3. The last one is the lack of winning endgames, especially things like RPvR, NPvN, BPvB and QPvQ are drawn almost all the time. How do you fix this one? Well it's harder than the rest, but let me give a few ideas: Don't make it game of points, but incentivize more aggressive attacks. For example, make this Stalemate Loses and Torpedo, this would greatly decrease the amount of drawn endgames.