Re: On-line engine blitz tournament October

[Joost Buijs]

The monthly on-line engine blitz tournament for October will take place on:

Saturday the 17th of October, 2:00 PM EST (Boston time) 20:00 CET (Amsterdam time)

To connect, use the following command:

winboard -zp -ics -icshost nightmare-chess.nl -icshelper timeseal -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz -keepAlive 30
(For UCI engines, add -fUCI)

If you don’t have an account, please submit a request to admin@nightmare-chess.nl.

Our tournament manager will be Eendje (Lisebeth @ ICC).

The format will be Swiss system, 4/1 time control, 11 rounds.

Lisebeth prefers to start the tournament on top of the hour, so please log in 15 minutes early. Late entries are not supported.

Disclaimer: The server has been completely rebuilt from scratch in a matter of weeks.
The new server core is much more stable, but making the FICS emulation layer 100% identical to the old server is very complicated.
There may be things that work slightly differently than before, and problems with some clients may also occur.
As far as we have been able to test it, Winboard, ICSDroneNG, and ChessPartner work without major issues.
We consider the upcoming tournament to be a test tournament, as this is the only method to identify any potential problems.
If major issues should arise, we can if necessary switch back to the old server.

[MartinBryant]

Do engines require their own openings book? Or does the controller provide openings?

[Bart Weststrate]

Do engines require their own openings book? Or does the controller provide openings?

Own book. From the engine or the gui/client which one uses. The server doesn't do openenings.