Buddy Engine Mumbo Jumbo

    During the last couple of months I have spent some time getting acquainted with Widows 11 on the new laptop and tinkering with the ChessBase programs. Fritz 20 has a unique feature I finally got around to looking at...the Buddy Engine. 

    In the past, running a second engine, the Kibbitzer, was available if you wanted a second opinion. Personally, I never saw a need for this because Stockfish is so strong that there isn’t really anything a second engine can add. It’s sort of like Magnus Carlsen asking for my opinion. 

    The Buddy Engine"is reported to be a helpful analysis tool. It runs along side the main engine as a secondary “lightweight” engine to “decode complex variations and annotate lines into plain conclusions.”  i.e. deep complicated variations are spelled out as clear, understandable ideas.

    The Buddy Engone only uses one CPU. For example, when analyzing with 4 CPUs when you turn on the Buddy Engine the main engine drops to 3 CPUs. After watching THIS video I guess I don’t understand precisely what the Buddy Engione is telling me and I don;t see its practical value. 

    Here is an example from a correspondence game I played over 60 years ago. 

 

 

     In this position my opponent (black) is to play his 17th move.  Running on 4 cores Stockfish 18’s top choice is 17...d5 after which white’s advantage is about half a Pawn. The second option is 17...gxh6 which is evaluated at 7/10 of a Pawn in white’s favor. This looks simple enough, but here is the Buddy Engine’s analysis: 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps I am missing something, but honestly I don’t see anything to be gained with the Buddy Engine especially considering that it is running on only one core while the main engie is running on three.  I am a huge fan of ChessBse products, but this looks like nothing more than sales hype.