Play in tourney with handicapped engines?

[JohnW]

Anyone know how one can play in a tournament with a group of handicapped chess engines? Fritz 13 has a "handicapped and fun" mode but it doesn't seem to allow a tournament. Thanks for any help...

[Modern Times]

Some UCI engines have parameters to limit their strength.

[Matthias Gemuh]

In ChessGUI you can time-handicap any engines individually.

Matthias.

[hgm]

Indeed, it is always possible to handicap engines by giving them time odds. In WinBoard you can do that by installing the engine with the extra WinBoard option /firstTimeOdds=N , where N is the factor with which you want to reduce its thinking time. So if your nominal time control for the tourney is 40 moves / 40 min, setting N=60 would only give the handicapped engine 40 moves / 40 seconds.

This only makes sense if the engines do not ponder. It is also not advisable to make the time odds so large that the actual time drops below 0.1 sec/move.