I think what ChessV is very good at is coming up with good openings. It seems to be a bit slow at coming up with good midgame and endgame moves, but I'm very pleased with how well it does openings.

In terms of the opening research, right now I'm researching the White win/Draw ratio of the Schoolbook setup. One concern brought up by Charles Daniel is how well Joker80 is playing the opening. Indeed, earlier I did some opening research by comparing how well Joker80 plays 15 different openings suggested by ChessV (see this posting for the openings). Joker80 was given 10 seconds to play 40 moves, and 100 games of each of the 15 openings was played (1500 games total). Here are the results:

Win: 46% Loss: 42% draw 11% Total 1389 (we played 1,500 games but only tallied games ending in a checkmate or draw)

Here, we see that the White advantage, which is 8% without any Schoolbook opening book, is only 4% when both White and Black play openings suggested by ChessV. Indeed, with the opening 1. e4 d5 2. exd5 Nb6, which appears to be a strong defense to 1. e4 in Schoolbook chess, we get the following results when playing at a time control of 60 seconds for 40 moves:

Win: 44% Loss: 43% draw 13% Total 204

The research I'm currently doing is the White win/loss/draw ratio when playing Schoolbook Chess at a pace of 90 seconds for 40 moves. I will have better results early next week, but here is the results I have so far:

Win: 52% Loss: 35% draw 13% Total 162

Here, we see White does a lot better when given more time to think about his move (but these results may change once I get 1,000 games or so at this slower time control).

I think the biggest conclusion we have gotten from all those 40-move-in-4-second games done with six different Capablanca opening setups is that having undefended flank pawns does not make the game an automatic win for White. It has been proposed (without empirical evidence backing the proposal) that having undefended pawns in a Capablanca opening setup strongly biases the game in White's favor, but I didn't see that at all in my experiment.

In terms of this being a popular variant, one advantage of Capablanca Chess is that there are a number of engines (Zillions, of course, but also ChessV, Joker80, TJchess10x8, etc.) that can play this variant. This allows us to do a lot of research; no Chess variant is popular enough to have tournaments with even dozens of participants, but we can simulate a huge tournament with very strong players and thousands of games played by having computer chess engines play each other over and over and over.

There seem to be two different communities of Chess Variant players: Chess Variant players who don't want to stick around with a given variant for very long; the majority of the community here is like this, which is why, for example, no one has played Schoolbook here for a while (people have since moved on to new variants). Then there's a community only interested in modest variants to Chess and analyzing those modest variants including building up an opening library and have a computer program play the variant in question as well as possible. For example, people making computer engines talk about having the engines play simple variants like Capablanca Chess in places like this forum.