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H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Mar 10 10:23 PM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from 10:02 PM:

The problem is that an N vs B imbalance is so small that you would be in the draw zone, and if there aren't sufficiently many errors, or not a sufficiently large one, there wouldn't be any checkmate. A study like Kaufman's, where you analyze statistics in games starting from the FIDE start position, is no longer possible if the level of play gets too high. All 300,000 games would be draws, and most imbalances would not occur in any of the games, because they would be winning advantages, and the perfect players would never allow them to develop. Current top engines already suffer from this problem; the developers cannot determine what is an improvement, because the weakest version is already so good that it doesn't make sufficiently many or large errors to ever lose. If you play from the start position with balanced openings. You need a special book that only plays very poor opening lines, that bring one of the players on the brink of losing. Then it becomes interesting to see which version has the better chances to hold the draw or not.

High level of play is really detrimental for this kind of study, which is all about detecting how much error you need to swing the result.

And then there is still the problem that if it would make a difference, it is the high-level play that is utterly irrelevant to the readers here. No one here is 2700+ Elo. The only thing of interest here is whether the reader would do better with a Bishop or with a Knight.


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