Chessbase GUI Match Newbie Questions

[terminator]

Hi,

I wanted to test a quick match of Delfi 5.3B vs Glaurung at 10 mins to make 40 moves repeating. I chose Perfect 12.ctg and made it read-only so that the engines do not learn or benefit from using the book often. I have given them both the same 12 move Perfect.ctg and also the same hash size. When I de-select alternate colours, one engine plays as black all the games. What is the best way to go about this? Is there a newbie guide to running ChessBase matches?

[Mike S.]

If you check alternate colors, the engines will always switch sides in every second game repeating the same opening variation each, if both use the same book. In other words, you get two games, A-B and B-A per opening variation.

I think that is ok for a fair engine comparision. - But if you don't want the opening variation to be repeated when the engines switch sides (alternate colors), the workaround could be: Copy the book and give the copy another name. Assign the original to the first engine and the copy to the other engine. With different books, the variations are not repeated but the colors will be alternated. The GUI will of course not know that the books are identical, actually.