Komodo 14.1 is available for immediate download and is on sale for $49.98. Komodo 14.1 plus a one year subscription ($119.98) is supposed to be for those who need the strongest engine available...they release updates to Komodo three to five times per year and you get the updates for a discount.
Back in November they released Dragon which is also available for download. It costs $74.98 (one year subscription for $119.98). Dragon uses Neural Network Updated Efficiently technology. You can also get Komodo 12 for free from the site HERE.
On the current CCLR 40/15 rating list the open source SashChess, a version of Stockfish, tops the chart, but against Stockfish 12 its score is +0 -0 =32 and its rating is only a few points higher than Stockfish 12. Komodo Dragon is in 6th place. Its score against Stockfish 12 is +0 -5 =72 and against SashChess it is +0 -5 =46. Download SashChess from GitHub HERE
Who are you going to believe? The Komodo team noted that Dragon beat Stockfish 12 in two test matches. The first was a Chess960 long blitz match and in the second Dragon, in MCTS mode, convincingly won a 3,600 game match.
Komodo's strength is its strong positional play and Dragon is enhanced in that area. The team estimates that Dragon is about 170 points stronger than Komodo 14 on four threads. That's at the blitz time control of two minutes plus a one-second increment.
Komodo 14 and Dragon have “personalities” that are intended to simulate the play of various types of human players. They also have something called “Auto Skill” in which the level goes up or down based on the course of the game so that you will have chances to save the game if you are losing and Komodo will put up stronger resistance if it's losing.
Both engines have an armageddon option which means you can instruct them to treat draws as losses meaning they will try to avoid draws for the side that is in a must win situation.
In a test tournament late last year in the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship, Dragon finished fourth behind Stockfish 12, Leelenstein and Leela Chess Zero.
Unless you need the armageddon option for some reason or you like to play against engines, to my mind paying $50-120 for a chess engine seems rather pointless when the free engines are stronger. If you want to play against a human, why use an engine? Why not play online?
That said, using a human-like engine could be useful if you're preparing for a tournament and want to get some idea of what a human might play in an opening position. In reality though, preparing for opponents is something that probably only GMs do. In open tournaments you don't know who you are going to play until the last minute. Besides, how can you prepare for a non-master? Who knows what they are going to play and one is usually out of the book in a scant handful of moves anyway.
When analyzing I usually do an auto-annotation using Stockfish 12 then run through the game manually using Komodo 12 because its evaluations seem closer to reality than Stockfish's high evaluations. Komodo's evaluations seem to be closer to human GM's evaluation of positions especially when no tactics are involved.
I ran an engine tournament at 4 minutes per game using the engines on my laptop with the following results. Conclusion...free is better...at least when it comes to chess engines.
This is going to sound like I have been living under a rock, but I just discovered lichess (pronounced lee-chess) a few days ago when my copy of Chess Life arrived and I noticed the US Championship was played on its server.
Apparently some people question if holding the US Championship (won by Wesley So) as well as the Women's (won by Irina Krush), the Senior's (won by Joel Benjamin, the Junior (won by John Burke) and the Girls (won by Carissa Yip) online with a time control of G/25+5 should even be considered as a "real" championship. Personally, I think it should because strict anti-cheating methods were used and as for the time control, I don't think it matters much because whatever the time control is the best players are going to have the best results.
Lichess is a free open-source chess server run by volunteers and kept on the Internet by donations. The site was started in 2010 by Thibault Duplessis as a hobby and it grew into one of the most popular chess websites in the world while remaining totally free. As the site states, most free websites subsist by selling ads or selling user data or making users pay for the good stuff, but they rely on donations.
After finishing a game, you can request analysis using Stockfish or you can watch titled players battle it out live. You can also hire a coach. The site claims to have software in place that prevents cheating. Lichess supports standard chess and 8 variants.
How did I not know about it?
I have played a few games there over the last few days and it's a nice site. Usually I hit Chess Hotel when I want a quick 10 minute game and it's a pretty nice site, but so far it seems like lichess has stronger opposition. Also, Playchess is another good option for playing online games.
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