Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.


[ Help | Earliest Comments | Latest Comments ]
[ List All Subjects of Discussion | Create New Subject of Discussion ]
[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]

Single Comment

First move advantage in Western Chess - why does it exist?[Subject Thread] [Add Response]
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Aug 8, 2012 05:20 PM UTC:
> HG, what are your numbers again for a one-pawn ad?

This corresponded pretty well with Betza's statement. Classical Pawn odds
(averaged over colors) deleting the f-pawn caused a 68% advantage in
Fairy-Max. The first-move advantage there was about 53%. (Probably a bit
smaller than in human games, because Fairy-Max is pretty stupid in the
opening, playing with a pretty strong randomizer there to provide game
diversity.)

So the difference between playing white or black ('1 tempo') is 6% The
difference between pawn ods and standard setup is 18%, i.e. 3 times
larger.

Note that it is quite difficult to be more precise: to determine win rate
with 0.5%-point accuracy already requires some 10,000 games.