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Aberg variation of Capablanca's Chess. Different setup and castling rules. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

💡📝Hans Aberg wrote on Sun, Apr 27, 2008 08:25 PM UTC:

H.G.Muller:
| You seem to attach a variable meaning to the phrase 'a pawn ahead', so
| that I no longer know if you are referring to KPK, or just any position.

I tried to explain how explain the idea of a general, or 'generic' situation by restricting to this example. In a general case, one could not classify the games as exactly.

| The rule of thump amongst Chess players is that in Pawn endings that
| you cannot recognize as obvious theoretical wins/draws/losses (like all
| KPK positons, positions with passers outside the King's square etc.) a
| Pawn advantage makes it 90% likely that you will win.

It haven't seen anything like that in end-game books, or players from the time whan I was active, before the days of computer chess. I think that nowadays, people learn much by playing against strong computer programs, rather than learning classical theory. So I do no think such percentages relate to any classical chess theory, and possibly no formal mathematical statistics. Such a statistical approach, even if formalized, may still work well in a computer that by brute force can do a deeper lookahead than a human, but may fail otherwise.