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Are there any chess programs, which play gambits? I have two solutions in mind:

  1. It tries to offer situations where one of your moves looks quite promising on the short term (3-5 moves), but later it turns out to be disastrous.

Or the opposite:

  1. It tries to reach positions, which look bad for you, but there's a single line (hard to find), which can save the day.

I guess the difficulty of writing such programs can be that it's not trivial to decide which lines are easy to be found by a human and which aren't. (And that also depends on the skills of the player, so some parameters would be required.)

Crouching Kitten
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  • I'd first consider picking up a gambit opening book, that could lead to some interesting play with the computer (but only during the openings). – PenumbraBrah Nov 08 '17 at 14:08
  • @TheHonestAtheist: thanks. When I try to google this, i always get real chess books in the results only :) or generic info pages. – Crouching Kitten Nov 08 '17 at 14:38
  • I googled for something like `gambit chess opening book bin` (notice the extension `bin`) and found this site: http://digilander.libero.it/taioscacchi/programmi/saros-page.html – PenumbraBrah Nov 08 '17 at 16:40
  • Also, similar question: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/9029/engine-not-necessarily-playing-strong-but-attractive – PenumbraBrah Nov 08 '17 at 16:44
  • If you're looking for an aggressive style engine (think "plays like Tal"), this forum was interesting (http://www.open-chess.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2355) and the corresponding suggested engine: http://www.pkoziol.cal24.pl/glass/index.htm – PenumbraBrah Nov 08 '17 at 16:47

2 Answers2

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Houdini may be worthwhile checking out. See link.

http://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm (4th paragraph down)

"The Chess Club Live Facebook page phrased it like this: "If there ever was a computer descendant of the romantic players like Morphy, Anderssen, Spielmann, Marshall, Bogoljubow, Tal, Nezhmetdinov, Shirov, Morozevich it would be Houdini. Houdini is the current World number 1 chess engine and plays in a very romantic style."

I didn't notice when the quote was from because the last time in the TCEC Championship that Houdini was #1 was 2013.

I use Houdini 5. I can attest to the romantic style of play. Quite a change when you are used to seeing how Komodo or Stockfish play. Settings are relatively user friendly.

It is a commercial engine but the developers do offer Houdini 1.5 for free.

hangejj
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  • Referencing section 1 of your opening post. I have played games where it made sacrifices that made me feel like I was gaining the upper hand but either due to poor play on my part, the strength of the engine or a mix of both Houdini won. – hangejj Nov 09 '17 at 01:22
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Stockfish, among several others (e.g. Fritz), has an aggressiveness parameter; you'll want to look in the 'Play Style' setting, or words to that effect, in the UCI.

A more aggressive engine has a higher propensity to make potentially unsound material sacrifices; it translates to positions where accurate play leads to an advantage, though assessing the ease of finding the refutation is beyond me.

Ken Wei
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  • (-1). The option has been removed from Stockfish for several years. See https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/ucioption.cpp. – ABCD Nov 08 '17 at 05:44
  • Furthermore, this answer is irrelevant to the question. The question is about looking for an engine playing dirty tricks, not aggressiveness. There's nothing in the answer that is relevant. – ABCD Nov 08 '17 at 05:45