Test Your Chess - How much of an advantage do you think each side has in these games?

Here's an image showing game positions that occurred between different chess engines rated around 2800 Elo.  All of them are taken with white to play.  Can you guess which side won for each, and as a bonus question, which of these games were won in less than 25 turns (When you have your guesses, the results are listed below.  Good luck

... when you are ready, scroll down.

...

...

How about a first hint?  White won 4 of these games.

...

...

How about a second hint?  3 of the games finished in 19 turns or less, the rest were at least 32.

...

...

Ok, here was how these played out:

For #1, White won in 15 more turns

For #2, Black won in 33 more turns

For #3, White won in 19 more turns

For #4, White won in 32 more turns

For #5, Black won in 17 more turns

For #6, White won in 55 more turns (yes rather surprising to see how long it went for but this was taken right before white began to gain an obvious advantage)

If anyone enjoyed this, let me know and I might make another one later.

5/6 with who won

4/6 on the amount of moves it took to get a decisive position

Great job on guessing the winning side for these.  The games are partly random so who knows if your estimate was actually 100% correct! haha   I'm kind of curious which one you missed on the winning side ... was it #2 or #6?

Guessing the remaining length of the game is a bit trickier ... #1 and #5 look like they are probably short but, for example, in #4 it seems a bit surprising it was 32 more moves ...  My guess is the pawns blocking each other made things slow.

Anyway, great to hear you tried it out and congrats on the 5/6 winning side guesses.

i miss-evaluated #4, i thought black would be eating those 2 pawns and have a very pleasant position.

Yes, those two pawns stood out as sort of odd-balls but I had been thinking of them more as the tie breakers ... on the other hand, now that you mention they could also be great to snack on!! LOL

Well, who knows, maybe if you would have been at the steering wheel on this it might have gone differently?  

My overall impressions on these are:

#1 White seems to have a slight advantage with the one passed pawn that the king should be able to cover.  In terms of game length, if that pawn can queen then it's probably not going to be long to win it.

#2 Honestly, this one is quite a head scratcher - piecewise they are practically identical.  The pawn structure for black MIGHT be slightly better, but overall it appears to be a close neck-to-neck position and probably not one that is going to end quickly because much of the board is locked up.

I picked the positions for these at points a turn or two before when there became an obvious advantage, so there's likely a good move or two buried in there somewhere, but I can't see it easily.

#3 This seems to favor black slightly at a quick glance, but white has that passed pawn ... and queens can sure wreak havoc on an endgame!  My guess is white was able to queen the pawn.

#4 And, of course, white seems up a bit on pawns but most the rest off it is locked up so probably not a quick win for white.

#5 This one appears almost easy to guess - very close to endgame and it is rook versus bishop   Not super hard to guess what happened

#6 This one seems a bit of a surprise - black looks to be up rather well in terms of pieces, but the pawns are strewn about like shrapnel haha   White has a nice tight cluster and likely reason why it took 55 more turns to finish with a white win is because white had a long hard fight recovering material in order to win it ... oh, if I just had one of those radio announcer voices right now, I could do it like a sports commentary:

"And white is regrouping to build a solid defense!"

"Black pushes a pawn!"

"White plays and epic move and slides the queen around to flank it!  The tension is building ..." 

"Ohhh, can you believe it folks?  Black makes a rush to the end zone with the rook but fumbles!!"

*keeps chewing on popcorn and watching the game* LMAO!!

Have fun "Chess_player"

I think #3 is winning by force with 1.g7 didn't calculate it but if black takes with the knight, the rook is lost. If the rook captures then e6 is lost.

Wow, very interesting.  To be honest I hadn't looked too deeply at the possible individual moves in these positions, but mostly selected them because the game engines appeared to significantly swing within a turn or two towards one of the players having a significant advantage.

It took me a bit to catch what you pointed at for #3, but yes, maybe that was part of what caused the swing towards white winning.  Yes, you might have discovered the "2800+ Elo" perspective for that position.  Here is a tentative congratulations and *applause*for having  potentially discovered the 'lynch pin' for that scenario  

Thank you for sharing your thoughts 🙏

Well it might not be. Playing g7 is very committal. I'd have to be able to calculate a forced win to play that rather than just bringing the king up to support the pawn on g6. Black is in kind of a bind so there is no rush.

@8 FYI, for all of these games, I don't think the computer was seeing any forced mates until maybe the last 8 to 10 turns of play, but each side was only given about 10 seconds to analyze and move, so it wasn't doing very deep analysis.

... but anyway, if you can find a forced win for #3, that would be pretty impressive and have beat the chess programs out by probably at east 7 turns of play.  My guess is that #5 could be a proven win for black but that's close to as much as my mind could grasp! ha

Enjoy

puzzle number #5 is actually a drawn position, the computer must not have a table base and blundered at some point. but regardless white can't win so figuring out that black won was not difficult.

@10 Great info and yes, mating with a bishop does quickly seem to be shown to be impossible.  The chess programs weren't the best ones out there, so yes, likely white blundered at some point.

You just reminded me of a game where I had a bishop and knight and after chasing the king around the board for 30 turns or so, I began to realize how much of a challenge it is to truly FORCE a mate ... in fact I might have just offered a draw instead, but there are obviously mating positions.  Something I noticed also was that for a mate in the corner, it depended upon whether or not the bishop could threaten the corner square.

I just did a search and you are likely already familiar with this but it appears to have solutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_and_knight_checkmate

... I'll defer delving in much further unless I come across that scenario again.