Materialism

[Henk]

When I play against my chess program I have no difficulty to win if I sacrifice a piece in a not too trivial way. How can I prevent my chess program from accepting sacrifices too easily. Should I implement king check extensions or improve (long distance) king safety ?

[bob]

When I play against my chess program I have no difficulty to win if I sacrifice a piece in a not too trivial way. How can I prevent my chess program from accepting sacrifices too easily. Should I implement king check extensions or improve (long distance) king safety ?

Search deeper. Extensions for check and reductions for nonsense moves will help. Improve king safety so you don't expose your king to tactics you can't quite see yet.

[Henk]

Searcher deeper is only good if it doesn't make positional play gets worse.

If position gets worse and king safety gets worse it is already too late. Searching deeper won't help anymore.

If a position is good, king attacks will normally fail.

So maybe positional play is the best way to prevent from king attacks with sacrifices.

Prevention is best.

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One doesn't know in advance if a move is totally useless so one should be careful when pruning. At the leaves these decisions are easier to make.

Could be that searching deeper is necessary for good positional play.

[bob]

Searcher deeper is only good if it doesn't make positional play gets worse.

If position gets worse and king safety gets worse it is already too late. Searching deeper won't help anymore.

If a position is good, king attacks will normally fail.

So maybe positional play is the best way to prevent from king attacks with sacrifices.

Prevention is best.

----

One doesn't know in advance if a move is totally useless so one should be careful when pruning. At the leaves these decisions are easier to make.

Could be that searching deeper is necessary for good positional play.

Searching deeper is ALWAYS better, until you can see all the way to forced mate. Even with good king safety you STILL have to be tactically accurate, which requires deep search.