PlentyChess Engine

    The other day while browsing the CCLR chess engine rating list I noticed that the engine in second place behind Stockfish was PlentyChess which I had never heard of. Also, I discovered that in one engine tournamet it had actually defeated Stockfish! When I checked its results it had not lost a game to any of the top engines (all draws) so it’s certainly worth checking out. 

    PlentyChess is a UCI engine with a neural network based evaluation meaning it plays in a more human-like style. The network was trained on 4.8 billion self-generated positions. Its playing style is noted for being similar to Stockfish and for exhibiting incredible tactics. 

    A test analysis of a couple of games to compare the results of Stockfish and PlentyChess yielded almost identical results with only slightly different centipawn scores. Bottom line: there does not seem to be much difference in the two engines, but it's worth keeping an eye on PlentyChess.

    You can download it HERE. I has some trouble figuring out what to download, but at the bottom of the page you will see PlentyChess-7.0.0-windows-generic.exe. That is the one I downloaded and then added the engine to Fritz with no problems.