
Xakru is the new Freestyle Champion
By Arno Nickel
The Czech team Xakru was the big surprise at the 4th PAL/CSS Freestyle Final,
held on Playchess.com on October 20-22.
Jiri Dufek and Roman Chytilek, the two centaur players behind the nickname,
had only been placed 10th in the preliminaries, but proved the old Freestyle
wisdom: "the last shall be the first". In fact, they dominated the
final with excellent play, and though they may have gained an advantage from
being underrated and the "dark horse", nobody could begrudge them
the $8,000 prize money.
Xakru – damn it!
Before we go into detail with the course of the tournament, which once again
was played in rapid chess time controls (60 min per player and game + 30 sec
per move), let's take a short look at extracts of the winners' report:
The Xakru team consisted of two players – the heart and core
of team Jiri Dufek and the (sometimes too fierce) spirit Roman Chytilek.
Jiri is 32 years old (2276 FIDE, 2568 ICCF IM) and works as system administrator.
Roman is 30 years old (2394 FIDE IM, 2649 ICCF GM), and his profession is
university teacher (political science). The Freestyle participation has been
one of our frequent joint ventures. Most notable of others was a book "Bijte
francouzskou" (Beating the French).

Jiri Dufek and Roman Chytilek of the winning Xakru team
We used mostly up to four computers with Rybka, Shredder and Loop 12. All
have teo CPUs, none of them having a 64bit operating system. As we both like
improvisation and adrenaline, we didn’t make any special opening preparation
for the finals. Therefore, there wasn’t any special "book-cooking“
against our opponents. Nevertheless, we were able to make use of our extensive
knowledge of the bright sides (and of course, less than bright ones) of engines.
Especially Jiri was clearly ready, willing and able to offer nontrivial ideas
and insights throughout the whole tournament, ideas that every engine developer
would be probably very happy to be acquaint with. This, plus Roman's consistent
(but responsible) opposition to engines and efforts to create and keep at
the board as much "fog“ and confusion as possible, eventually
led to success, which also offers very justified hopes for the next Freestyle
tournaments. One thing remains yet to be decided – whether to further
carry the banner of Xakru. Xakru, or better "K sakru“, means in
Czech "Damn it!“. As a defending champions we will surely consider
a label that would be much more presentable.
Jiri Dufek played from Usti nad Labem and Roman Chytilek played from Brno,
distance about 250km, we were communicating via Skype. We got our first experience
in cooperation in Freestyle during the tiebreak in the 3rd Freestyle, but
there had been no chance to continue in the 3rd Final.
Flying Saucers

Dagh Nielsen |
The second winner was – also surprising in some respects – was
Flying Saucers, whom I had already introduced to you in my previous
report as Dagh Nielsen from Danmark. The funny thing is, he had been
placed 9th in the main tournament, one place in front of Xakru, so that we
can read that table backwards, in order to get the winner's list. Dagh startet
with 3 out of 6 in the final, so what could he really expect? I think, he
never dreamt of winning $4,000 in the end (achieving 5.5 out of 9). But let's
listen to his story:
The team Flying Saucers consisted of one player + computer(s). I am 29 years
old (2163 FIDE), from Denmark, and a mathematician by education. This was
the second Freestyle event I participated in.
I have been engaged in computer assisted chess for several years. It started
out as opening analysis out of curiousity, and for about a year I have been
focusing on making opening books for engines, with my engines battling it
out on the Playchess server. That I would participate in the Freestyle events
as active centaur and not as pure engine has never been in doubt, though.
My hardware in the preliminary was a dual core Opteron. Before the final,
Vasik Rajlich had kindly agreed to let me use his quad Opteron, and helped
me set it up with a UCI (UCI = engine protocol) pipe over the net. My technical
setup then was:
Fritz 9 interface, with two instances of Rybka running. The quad on pipe
running in 1-variation mode, and my own dual core running in 2/3/4-variation
mode. This way, I would be alarmed by deep resources and assessments fast,
while at the same time getting immediate information about the forcedness
of the investigated positions, in other words, how many alternatives would
be worth a check. In the previous Freestyle event and in some of the games
of the preliminary in this one, I had had the Fritz 9 engine running as well,
in order to get an aggressive second opinion. I discarded this option for
the final, mainly out of a philosophy to keep things technically simple.
For the same reason, I did not use tablebases. The games themselves, I played
through the free playchess client.
My "strategy" for the final was simply to try to not lose any
games due to horrible play or bad time management. Additionally, I tried
to predict what openings could arise, and spent considerable time preparing
for this, hoping that this would put me in position to also play for a win
in some games. I have annotated 7 of my games from the final. The annotations
are primarily intended for giving the reader a picture on what went on "behind
the scenes", and I've tried to be as honest and open as possible. In
the annotations, you can find more specific remarks about my considerations
during and before the individual games.
In general, I've found the Freestyle events extremely exciting, both as
participant and as observer. I like to think of Freestyle chess as "blitz
correspondence chess". For the many people interested in correspondence
chess, but who don't play due to time issues, the Freestyle events IMHO offer
a thrilling alternative. In fact, I could see why many people would rather
play Freestyle than correspondece chess, just as OTB players get addicted
to online blitz and forget to visit their local chess club ;-) One weekend
of playing, and you can put the games out of your head in good conscience.
Freestyle chess can still be hard work though :P.
Here are some comments of mine to a few frequently asked questions about
Freestyle chess:
Do centaurs hold any advantage over pure engines?
My take on this is that, yes, pure engines assisted by strong books and
strong hardware can reach at least an average level. However, to reach the
highest levels of play, usually a little extra will be necessary. I think
the results of the Freestyle events so far confirm this. For example, for
this final, only two pure engines qualified, even though they made up a good
part (30%–50%) of the preliminary field.
Is human chess skill worth anything at all, or is all that matters skill
at operating a computer?
My answer would certainly be similar to the one above.
I'm an average club player, would I have any chance to succeed?
Certainly yes! Just remember the sensational win of team ZackS in the first
Freestyle event. There will no doubt arise situations where a lack of chess
knowledge, intuition or skill will take a toll, as it did for me in this
final. Also, perhaps one can say that weaknesses in certain aspects of the
game put a limit to your flexibility. The set of types of positions you can
sensibly afford to enter is reduced, and if it is reduced too much, odds
are that you will be caught sooner or later. So, maybe knowing your weaknesses
and how to avoid them from being exposed can be said to be an important skill.
I have average hardware, do I have any chance to succeed?
Yes. I myself qualified for the final on average hardware and with average
chess skill. The key is to find ways to maximise your combined centaur skill.
That being said, I firmly believe that I would not have stood many changes
in the final without the additional hardware help that I got access to.
Overall, to succeed, in my opinion what is essential is not having any weak
links in the total "chess entity setup" – no clearly inferior
hardware, no insufficient practice in active analysis with engines under
time constraints, no bad opening handling, and no largely missing chess understanding.
Then one has a fair shot.
How high was the level of play in the final?
Not sure, I think overall very high. What is more important is that there
were countless highly spectacular games in the final, and I certainly hope
the spectators enjoyed watching them just as much as I think we enjoyed playing
them. I also hope new readers will be inspired to take part in the fun in
coming Freestyle events.
Summary
Four teams shared the prize money for the third place: Jazzled, Frigderi,
Elissa and Nebula. I introduced all of them in my previous report.
So this time I will make it short, especially as I haven't received any reports
from these teams. Jazzled is already well-known as the 28 year old
American Joseph Soney, who took the second place in the Third Freestyle Final.
He is playing on a very fast hardware (Quad Opteron, which means 8 processors
in total), with a selfmade opening book. Once more Jazzled proved
to be a very solid team, it remained the only one undefeated.
This time Joseph let Rybka run as an automatic engine, the same as Nebula,
who was the proud winner of the main tournament and whose real name is Anastasios
Kakirdakis from Greece. I noticed that Nebula uses a gigantic book, often covering
about 25 moves.
We may once more interprete the results of the final as a clear, but lucky
dominance of skilful centaurs (equipped with powerful machines of course) over
pure engines. In my opinion this is a very good message for Freestyle. Yet,
the difference is not really as clear as it appears. If Nebula had
won (instead of losing) its last game against Flying Saucers, it would
have caught Xakru with also six points!
Elissa was the comeback of the famous Zacks, the young American
team that won the very first PAL/CSS Freestyle Tournament in sensational style,
though they were far away from a master degree in chess. Frigderi
is a player named Pavel Bystrov, living near Bonn. So far he did not share
any further information about himself. The only thing which might be sure is
that he is not a German. So these four teams won each $500 dollars.
Rentner2, IM Joerg Blauert from Luebeck, had a bad start with his
game versus Zorchamp. He consolidated in the middle of the tournament,
but then broke down once again. He was perhaps the finalist with the most human
input (which can be expected of an International Master), but again and again
he slipped into horrible time pressure, which against engines is ten times
harder than against "human only" opponents.
Rentner2, Icy45 (Finland) and Ibermax (England), had all
3.5 points. They all won only one game and lost three. Icy45 started
the final as a centaur player, but the last three games, after he had only
2 out of 6, he switched to "engine only". In the last round Rybka
succeeded in "passing over the red lantern", as we say in German,
to Zorchamp. It remained unexplicable why Zor, after a good
start with 2 out of 3, almost collapsed in the second half of the tournament.
Some kibitzers guessed it might not be the real Zorchamp playing,
but a substitute. I fear we have to accept the old wisdom “the answer
is blowin’ in the wind”.
All in all we had a successful event, with a much lower rate of draws compared
to the 3rd Freestyle Final. It's only 60% (I predicted: less than 66%) compared
to 75% in the previos final. The whole series of Freestyle events in 2005 and
2006 was an interesting and still promising experiment. Let's see what Freestyle
Chess will bring in future.
Final standings

Results of the individual final rounds
1st Round – Fr. 14:00 |
2nd Round – Fr. 17:00 |
3rd Round – Fr. 20:00 |
Nebula – Xakru ½ |
Xakru – Elissa 1-0 |
Icy45 – Xakru 0-1 |
Icy45 – Flying Saucers ½ |
Ibermax – Jazzled ½ |
Rentner2 – Nebula 1-0 |
Rentner2 – Zor_champ 0-1 |
Zor_champ – Frigderi ½ |
Frigderi–Flying Sauc. ½ |
Frigderi – Ibermax ½ |
Flying Sauc.–Rentner2 ½ |
Jazzled – Zor_champ ½ |
Jazzled – Elissa ½ |
Nebula – Icy45 1-0 |
Elissa – Ibermax ½ |
4th Round – Sat. 14:00 |
5th Round – Sat 17:00 |
6th Round – Sat. 20:00 |
Xakru – Ibermax 1-0 |
Rentner2 – Xakru ½ |
Xakru – Zor_champ 1-0 |
Zor_champ – Elissa ½ |
Frigderi – Icy45 ½ |
Flying Sauc.–Ibermax 1-0 |
Flying Sauc.–Jazzled 0-1 |
Jazzled – Nebula ½ |
Nebula – Elissa ½ |
Nebula – Frigderi ½ |
Elissa – Flying Saucers½ |
Icy45 – Jazzled ½ |
Icy45 – Rentner2 ½ |
Ibermax – Zor_champ 1-0 |
Rentner2 – Frigderi 0-1 |
7th Round – Sun. 14:00 |
8th Round – Sun 17:00 |
9th Round – Sun. 20:00 |
Frigderi – Xakru ½ |
Xakru – Flying Saucers 0-1 |
Jazzled – Xakru ½ |
Jazzled – Rentner2 ½ |
Nebula – Zor_champ 1-0 |
Elissa – Frigderi ½ |
Elissa – Icy45 1-0 |
Icy45 – Ibermax ½ |
Ibermax – Rentner2 ½ |
Ibermax – Nebula 0-1 |
Rentner2 – Elissa 0-1 |
Zor_champ – Icy45 0-1 |
Zor_champ–Flying Sauc. ½ |
Frigderi – Jazzled ½ |
Flying Saucers–Nebula 1-0 |
PAL/CSS Freestyle Chess Champions
2005 – Zacks (USA)
2006 – Zorchamp (VAE)
2006 – Rajlich (HUN)
2006 – Xakru (CZE)
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