correspondence chess in the age of NNUE

[Thomas A. Anderson]

... The key is that as long as the chosen opening positions are near the edge of the win/draw line, this won't be the case even with a million to one speedup from current hardware.

I hope those positions can be found/provoked by future engines because they understand chess much better than actual ones, and not because they speculate.

Using tools/engines to find test/borderlin postions for the same tools/engines smells like catch22.

I mean, you know that an engine plays statistically. Statistically is different than perfect. Stockfish cannot say if following 30 straigth quiet moves there is something to win because there is not statistict knowledge inside it to be able to follow such moves. A future engine maybe will be able to, so it will find positions that maybe are not wining, but are wining against current stockfish because it cannot understand them.

That's very possible and I used the AlphaZero games heavily to search for positions that SF didn't judge in the same way. But this means using engines/tools to create challanges for different engines/tools.

[cdani]

My question is, what are the popular openings of correspondence players?

I saw everything. Most strong players do whatever is complicated enough to try that the game lasts enough to prove your rival.

[Ovyron]

Let's suppose that the rules of chess were changed in some way to eliminate draws while keeping the chances of White and Black fairly equal.

What about my idea of starting with a countdown? Every time a player moves the countdown goes down by 1. If white manage to force a draw it counts as a win. If the countdown hits 0, black wins. 0% Draws.

The idea comes from a Starcraft's Custom Rule map called "Heaven's Last Stand", where Jesus and the other angels are in Heaven and being attacked by Satan and his forces; Satan can create infinitely new demons to be sent to attack, though this takes time, while Heaven has many outposts that need to be defended.

Due to the nature of the game, the outposts of Heaven eventually fall, so Satan keeps always making progress, until he makes it to the last Stand which is indefensible and hell always wins. 3 Players control hell and 4 control Heaven's units. It uses all the units of the Zerg and Terran factions of the game, and some custom ones, so the only way to balance it is to make games shorter (make heaven weaker) or longer (make Hell weaker.)

What they did is adding a countdown that's about "waiting for God", when it hits 0 God arrives and Heaven wins automatically. It has been specifically designed so that when 7 skilled players play together hell is about to win when the clock is reaching 0, with close encounters being really fun, 0% drawn games, and about 50% Heaven/Hell split wins (Hell has the edge since it's given enough time to beat Heaven, but this is balanced because less experienced players tend to play hell so the skilled heaven players can defend long enough for the countdown to hit 0.)

How were these guys able to solve the balance problem so easily, in a much more complex 7-player game with a real time system by just adding a countdown and chess can't?

I have no idea what the countdown should be, but we could be at a point at which beating black is impossible so you switch white's goal to forcing a draw ASAP, and black just needs to defend and keep the game going longer than that.