your analysis is reasonable. whenever i want to try against an engine i generally choose positional lines like english opening etc..
i used to practice against shredder 4 which simulates humans by throwing in weak moves occasionally. of course, you don't know which moves are weak so it's like a real game. also, you can set your own level and it increases its strength every time you beat it.
The point is I don't really like to set it to play more human-alike so I have a chance. I downloaded Lucaschess for that which contains a plethora of engines of all sorts of strengths.
But I hardly ever feel like playing it.
I want to see what it is like to lose against supposedly perfect chess.
Also I feel I don't play as good as I could when the engine is actually beatable and I feel bad when I lose to them anyways, which is not the case when getting slaughtered by Houdini or Critter.
I have played against Fritz and Houdini at full strength in the past maybe for a hundred games. And I play my usual opening, aggressive open games. I lost all of them despite taking few take backs per game. What is amazing, when I play against humans, my attack and defense improves a lot. It pays to spar with an engine.
Yes, I play chess engines in fritz and dasher my time control are usually 15 min games. I do not play a full strength I get tired of getting crushed. When I use the fritz GUI I play on the handicap mode and in dasher I played the chess personality (engine) jennifr 1800 and david 2000. I still have not beat david yet.
I don't play against Houdini. I generally play myself with Chessmaster. It is like you can see your progress by gradually defeating higher ratings. This way I can check my progress. Like Mandy said, it helps my play against humans.What is more interesting is that before joining chess.com I was defeating 1600-1700 ratings and after 2 monthas here I produced my best result yet, defeating 2050 rating.
My secific purpose to use chess master in practicing openings. My d4 opening repetoir is the result of some 175 games with chess master.
I'd like to know who else practices against the super-strong engines like Houdini or Critter and how he usually fares.
I do it from time to time and my best result was mate after 46 moves.
That is being mated by the engine of course. Usually my hopes of playing aggressively die very quickly and I get into a defensive position pretty soon. Sometimes I manage to defend what the engine attacks but then it switches over to something else and I cannot reorganize quick enough.
Most of the time how i lose is by the tactical motiv of overloading. The engine overloads one of my pieces, forces it to retake somewhere and then has the upper-hand on what was attacked.
I heared it becomes easier in closed positions and that's how I beat "Chess Live" on my phone usually. But Houdini and Critter usually don't allow the position to become closed.
So has anyone else experience in this area aswell?