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BGonline.org Forums
Best online data source for studying opening replies?
Posted By: Matt Ryder In Response To: Best online data source for studying opening replies? (Timothy Chow)
Date: Thursday, 24 December 2009, at 6:06 a.m.
1. First, if you don't already know about it, you may find my one-page summary helpful. It is based on Stick's rollouts.
Helpful is an understatement. This is a brilliant summary, thanks! I have made myself a double sided business card sized version for quick reference (using standard nactation).
One thing I like about your adaptive nactation is that you've retained the '*' convention for a hit. Just about my only real beef with the standard nactation is that it doesn't clearly distinguish the hitting plays. (While there are specialised symbols such as H, K and X denoting hits, many of the other symbols highlight another aspect of the move but belie the hit; a shame for the sake of the space of an asterisk).
2. As a general rule, cubeful rollouts are to be preferred to cubeless rollouts, unless you have some reason to suspect that the bot is not handling the cube correctly.
I'm glad you've clarified this. I remember there was some controversy at one point, with some experts claiming the Snowie live-cube rollout option was a bust.
3. As for the quandary of which bot to choose, that is just a fact of life that you have to deal with...I would recommend making an arbitrary choice.
I've come to the same conclusion. Since both Tom and Stick base their assessments largely on GNU, I'll use that bot as my base. For the sake of this exercise and to prevent my brain from exploding, I'm going to pretend the Snowie/XG counter-evaluations don't exist right now :-)
But here's the point: Your ultimate goal is not to memorize 400 separate facts anyway. Your goal is to develop an understanding of the opening, with bot data as a means towards that end. It's more important that you start observing these patterns and making sense of them than that your plays match some bot's play in every last detail.
This is great advice, thanks. I was getting twisted out of shape because there's still a surprisingly large amount of uncertainty about the second roll of the game. Before I looked into it, I sort of assumed that the bots were mostly in agreement and the remaining disputes were simply a matter of precision. It seems this is not so. However in spite of the uncertainty there's clearly much that can be learned. Nack's book on the 31 replies opened my eyes to the insight that a knowledge of the first couple of rolls and a clear understanding of why they're played in particular ways can illuminate the whole game in new and startling ways.
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