Just curious if anybody else uses those programs.
The peshka modules basically teaches stuff by way of many many sample problems, at least for the lower level modules. There’s actually so many problems that I don’t think there’s an expectation of anybody doing every problem in some of the modules. I know at some point, I started skipping sections because the middle levels in the modules were only slightly different from each other. (Essentially, the number of pieces on the board would increase as you went up in a level.)
On Ches King 2017: it’s interesting. I was frustrated by it at first and couldn’t understand why it played so poorly at the level I had it at. If you load Houdini, it’s going to play really strong, but the robot version plays pretty weakly. Not because the level you picked was poor. It was making terrible mistakes at level 1750. I finally figured out that it’s not really meant to be a replacement for Fritz or other general chess playing program. What it does is have you go up a ladder and and as you go up the ladder, it gets harder, and you can bump up the playing ability, but it’s doing the ladder that really increases it’s strength. For example, a game might want you to pin a rook, and you have to play 10 games where you pin a rook to finish out that part of the ladder. So it’s making bad moves in order for the player to “find” the mistake.
I only figured this out recently and I was playing in non-rated mode, but now I’m going to dial down the level on Chess King 2017 and just play rated games. The program should just get stronger as I move up the ladder, eventually I’ll catch up to whatever arbitrary level I put the game at and will bump up the levels as needed.
Bottom line is that you can’t really skip to a higher level. If you do, you’ll get more “points” awarded when you win the game, but it’s the ladder points that you accumulate that eventually get’s the game to play harder.
If your “rating” is 1000 and you crank it up to 1750, Chess King, in a rated game, will play a lot harder, but over all, it really just want you to play the ladder and step up to the arbitrary level you selected. If you play 1750 unrated and you rating is 1000, the program will just make stupid mistakes. It’s weird. I’m not even sure I’m explaining it correctly here. But in any event, start low and just play rated games and crawl up the ladder is the best way to use the program.
My confusion was that I didn’t realize there wasn’t a “general playing mode”, even though it has a “classic chess” mode. Every game is part of the program’s ladder structure. I was just playing random unrated games at different levels trying to figure out why the program played so bad.
If someone has a different take on the program, feel free to post.