Gambit Rating List

Ratings of chess engines are well established on the known rating lists. Will anything change when we feed engines with only (playable) gambit positions? We carefully created 100 gambit opening positions to find out.


Conditions

1. Only active engines, those who are in development.

2. Time control CCRL style, 40/2. Hash table size 128Mb.

3. Cutechess-cli concurrency compatible.

Excluded Engines

1. Inactive engines, those engines who haven't been updated

    for a long time.

2. Known derivatives.

Gambit Rating List

2021-12-15


   Gambit Rating List  : 2021-12-15
   Time Control        : 40 moves in 2 minutes repeating
   Software            : cutechess-cli 1.1.0.f.1.0
   Elo calculation     : Ordo 1.2.6
   
   Games               : 224.453
   Unique Engines      : 74
   Total  Engines      : 208
   
                             

Head to Head

Statistics

Gambit Rating List

2021-09-30

on 20 cores and 4Gb Hash


Whenever a new engine manages to enter the top-5 of the Gambit Rating List it wil be included in the 20 core rating list. The newest entry is Koivisto 6.16 The latest update update is Komodo-Dragon 2.5 which gained 63 elo and is now only 13 elo points away from Stockfish 14.

   # PLAYER                 :  RATING  POINTS  PLAYED   (%)
   1 Stockfish 14           :  3608.5   408.5     600    68
   2 Komodo-Dragon 2.5      :  3595.6   338.5     500    68
   3 Komodo-Dragon 2        :  3533.5   299.5     500    60
   4 Ethereal 13.25-NNUE    :  3437.4   250.0     600    42
   5 Koivisto 6.16          :  3425.6   239.0     600    40
   6 SlowChess 2.7          :  3421.2   235.0     600    39
   7 RubiChess 2.2          :  3415.2   229.5     600    38

PGN

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CCRL vs GRL

a comparison


With the start of the Gambit Rating List we modeled the ratings to be compatible with CCRL. Now (day of writing July 9, 2021) with over 90,000 games played we can make a comparison and conclude it does. Consider:

   # PLAYER                :  RATING PLAYED  CCRL  Difference
   1 Stockfish 13          :  3667.5  3500   3506  161
   2 Komodo-Dragon 1       :  3581.3  3000   3469  112
   3 Lc0 v27               :  3529.8   800   ----  not listed on the CCRL 40/15 list.
   4 SlowChess 2.6         :  3421.9  2400   3379   42
   5 RubiChess 2.1         :  3380.5  2900   3338   42
   6 Pedone 3.1            :  3361.7  2900   3334   27
   7 Igel 3.0.5            :  3355.0  2900   3342   13
   8 Ethereal 12.75        :  3353.8  2700   3320   33

Our first conclusion is that the top engines profit the most, see the full list. A few observations:

Observation 1 - Looking at the top-3

Engine

CCRL elo

Difference

GRL elo

Difference

Stockfish 13

3506


3667


Komodo Dragon

3469

-37

3581

-86

SlowChess 2.6

3379

-127

3421

-246

On CCRL the difference between Stockfish and Komodo is 37 elo, on GRL 86.


On CCRL the difference between Stockfish and SlowChess is 127 elo, on GRL 246.


Stockfish and Komodo massively profited from the gambit openings.

Observation 2 - if we look further from rank 4-20 (with the exception of Nemorini) we see that these engines still profit from the gambit openings but less and less. Engines after rank 20 even start to lose considerable elo. The biggest exceptions are : Tucano 9.0 +45 | Benjamin +41 and Supernova 2.3 +35. While we are not familiar with the playing style of Tucano and Supernova we are with Benjamin because it's the gambit version of ProDeo.


Observation 3 - Benjamin -- because of its playing style -- greatly profits (+87 elo) when we compare the ratings with ProDeo 3.0 and ProDeo 3.1 while 3.0 and 3.1 definitely are stronger, not only in self-play but also when we compare the ratings of CCRL and GRL.

Engine

CCRL elo

GRL elo

ProDeo 3.1

2798

2791

ProDeo 3.0

2776

2729

Benjamin 1.0

2699

2739

On CCRL ProDeo 3.0 scores 77 elo more than Benjamin while on the GRL Benjamin rates 10 points more than ProDeo 3.0, a difference of 87 elo!


Conclusions

1. The GRL makes sense.

2. Making a special gambit version makes even more sense.

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Notes

Anchore Engines are inactive rock solid engines with well established elo ratings that are needed to stabilize the ORDO elo calculation. Anchore Engines will disappear in time when more games are played, they are only needed at the start of a rating list. However games played by Anchore Engines are included in the PGN download.