On-line blitz tourney October

[hgm]

The next on-line engine blitz tourney will be held

Saturday, Oct 10, 3 pm EST (21:00 CET)

Everyone is welcome! Server IP = 80.100.28.169. The server is now on-line permanently.

[Engin]

hi ,

of course i will play again with Tornado !

[Greg Strong]

And I will lose again with Quadrox

[hgm]

You can of course enter ChessV as well now, if you have a dual!

[Spock]

I have often thought of randomly choosing a winboard engine and particpating in some of these (as long as this is not for just authors and their team members) but I just have no clue what to do.... I can fire up winboard and that is it. Is there an idiots' guide somewhere as to what to do ?

[hgm]

Operators are aso welcome! Easiest would be to start up WinBoard from the command prompt. You would need the command (from the WinBoard diectory)

winboard -ics -icshost 80.100.28.169 -icshelper timeseal -zp -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz

(add the option -fUCI if it is a UCI engine). The first 5 options (upto and including timeseal is what you need to play on the server as a human, and they specify the ICS web address and the time-stamping program needed by the ICS to correct for network lag. Normally you would be able to select that from the WinBoard startup menu, from a combo box, but my ICS is not pre-installed in that combo box yet. If you wanted to play at FICS you could simply have selected freechess.org from the combo box, and added the other options (specifying the engine) in the "Additional options" text edit.

Once you start WinBoard you get a console window with the ICS logon screen. Type your name (it will ask for a password when the name is registered) to login. Once you are in you can type commands to the server.

Useful commands are "who" to see who ese is logged in, and "help" to find out which commands exist. To communicate with other users use "tell USER ..." or "shout ...". To start a 5+0 game, type "match OPPONENT 5 0". When you are in a tourney, the tourney manager will start the games automatically, and you only have to watch.

To facilitate conversation with others, replace your winboard.exe by the one I you download from

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/winboard.zip

This version supports chat windows, which can be requasted from the "Mode" menu, and which you can use to communicate with upto three different persons, by typing their name in the "chat partner" field of the window. Everything you type in the window will then be automatically send to that person (WB will take care of prefixing it with "tell" and the chosen chat-partner name), and every tell the person addresses to you will appear in that window.

The server is up, running a Fairy-Max bot, which you could use to test any time you like.

[Spock]

OK, I will give this a go tonight Some questions:

ENGINEFOLDER - is that a full path and does it need 'quotes' or "quotes" around it ?

I don't have a username, can I play a match as guest ?

I have Winboard 4.4.0 I think it is - so best to replace the exe with the one in the link you've provided ?

So "match Fairy-Max 5 0" should get a game going ?

I need to figure out what 21:00 CET is in UK time - could be exactly the same, or an hour out because of daylight saving. You are in Amsterdam - is CET same as Netherlands time at the moment ?

[metax]

21:00 CET is 20:00 UK time, as far as I know.
Amsterdam is in the CET zone.
You can get the time in several cities all over the world here.

[hgm]

OK, I will give this a go tonight Some questions:

ENGINEFOLDER - is that a full path and does it need 'quotes' or "quotes" around it ?

This is only needed if it the pathname contains spaces or other special characters that would otherwise be misinterpreted. You can use any of the methods single quotes, double quotes or braces. That also holds for the name of the engine executable itself. Writing the .exe is not really needed.

I don't have a username, can I play a match as guest ?

This should be possible. The only thing that won't be possible for unregistered players is to participate in the automated tournament, because the TM bot will try to look up your rating to see if it falls within the set bounds, and unregistered players do not occur in the rating list. So if you want to participate Saturday, I would have to make you an account. But I want the handles to be the name of the engine that plays, so before I can do that you would have to decide on the engine.

I have Winboard 4.4.0 I think it is - so best to replace the exe with the one in the link you've provided ?

Yes, I think that would be more convenient, as 4.4.0 does not have the chat windows. Just overwrite the winboard.exe in the WinBoard folder of the 4.4.0 install by the .exe at the link, and you will have 4.4.1.

So "match Fairy-Max 5 0" should get a game going ?

In fact the ICS "handle" of Fairy-Max is FairyMax, as you would automatically discover when you did "who" on the server. This because only letters are accepted in ICS handles (and they are not case sensitive). In fact the ICS is quite clever in completing incomplete names; "match fair 5 0" would work as well.

I need to figure out what 21:00 CET is in UK time - could be exactly the same, or an hour out because of daylight saving. You are in Amsterdam - is CET same as Netherlands time at the moment ?

Indeed, and we still have daylight-savings time as well. So it is GMT+2, and I suppose UK will be GMT+1.

[Spock]

Match against FairyMax started successfully. I used ETChess as an experiment, the only issue is it was not pondering. I'm not sure if that is an ETChess issue or not, I'll try something else