Engine Tournaments

Under Engines arrow Tournament (or keyboard shortcut F9) you can run a tournament between any number of engines.

The tournament may be saved as an .at (Arena Tournament) file and resumed or edited later. This clearly gives the you the advantage of saving your favourite tournament set - up, say a best of WB engine tournament and having the ability to adjust it easily and quickly.

[_] Tab Sheet Settings:

The tournament can be named and the highlighted available engines selected or deselected with a mouse-click.

Should you desire a match between two engines only then select the two engines and either Round robin or Gauntlet.

For more than two engines however the two modes produce different results.

A Round robin format means that each engine plays every other engine and will produce a much higher number of games than the Gauntlet where the first engine in the list plays every other engine for the specified number of rounds.

Carousel is an alternative method for calculating the pairings in Round Robin tournaments.

The number of rounds is the number of games per pairing. After every game (within a pairing) the colours are switched. In order to avoid awarding an advantage for the first engine, an even number of games should be selected, because white has a small advantage because of the right to move first.

With three engines (e.g. Chispa, Crafty and Ruffian) the following pairings are generated:

  • Chispa ------ Crafty
  • Ruffian ------ Chispa
  • Crafty ------ Ruffian

Every round consists of three games. If you select 2 rounds, the following games will be played:

First Round:

  • Chispa - Crafty
  • Ruffian - Chispa
  • Crafty - Ruffian

Second Round:

  • Crafty - Chispa
  • Chispa - Ruffian
  • Ruffian - Crafty

You see that the colours have been switched in the second round. The same applies for all even rounds, if you selected more rounds.

"Level" selects the desired time control for the tournament.

The button "Delete results" deletes the stored results in the at file. The tournament table will be emptied. All results of this tournament will be lost!

If you select a name for the tournament, it will be used in the PGN file as "Site" tag, if not, the name specified under Option / User Data will be used.

The PGN "Round" tag will be set to the according Tournament round.

If you click the "New" button, a new tournament will be created. The default filenames will be set for saving the various output, see below.

The same applies for the "Duplicate" button, but here the participants will not be deleted.

The button "Replace engine with newer version" can be used to replace an engine with a newer version. The new engine (e.g. Delfi 4.2 instead of Delfi 4.1) gets the results of the old engine. In this way you can introduce engine updates into a ongoing tournament.

The button "Add player" adds a (human) player to the tournament. If you want to participate yourself in a tournament, don't hesitate... You will be told if it is your turn to play.

The button "Add board computer" adds a board computer player to the tournament. But operating the board computer is still your task!

With the button "Show results" you can generate the tournament result files once again, without having to re-start the tournament. Arena shows the main window, where you can view e.g. the tournament table. For this table and the individual results there are separate tab sheets under the move list. Also the HTML file will be generated newly, which you can view by your Internet browser, e.g. in Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox or Opera.

[_] Tab Sheet Options:

On top of this tab you can select the chess variants: normal chess, Chess 960 or Shuffle Chess.

You can select the starting position for each game here. "Default" means the normal chess starting position, of course. "Load from PGN/EPD file, load sequentially" means that Arena loads the starting positions from a PGN or EPD file. If you want to perform a tournament with defined starting positions, you can do so this way. If you want the starting position chosen at random, you can select the third possibility "Load from PGN/EPD file, choose randomly". Arena then chooses a starting position at random to start the game with. In the line below you can select the file to be loaded. Frequently tournaments are performed with the well-known John Nunn starting positions. If you want to check engines without their opening book, this is the way to do so.

"Repeat start position with switched colours" means that in the next round the same starting position as the current comes on the board, if the next round number is even. So if you want to do a tournament with defined starting positions and where each engine gets the same starting position once with white and once with black, then you should choose this option. The engines switch sides every round, so the same two engines play two games with the same starting position, but with switched sides. The number of rounds must of course be set to a value greater than one.

If you chose "Test mode" , no games will be played and no engines will be loaded. The result of all tournament games will be set by random. With this function you can simulate the tournament, e.g. you can check if the tournament tables look the way you like.

If you selected 'Adjudicate game', the game will be terminated if the respective value in centipawns is reached. The value must be negative in order to work correctly!

Important: This works only, if both engines put out correct values under this threshold. If one engine gives wrong values for some reason, this feature does not work. Check in a normal test outside of a tournament if a good position for the engine is always positive, and an bad position for the engine is alway negative. Check if this is true regardless if the engine plays white or black. If the engine sends positive values even if it is playing with the black pieces in a bad position, the engine sends values always from white's point of view. Then you have to check the check box: EnginesarrowManagearrowSpecialarrow"Values absolute".

In addition, this value must fall below the threshold for 6 half moves.

The value should of course be low enough, e.g. -500 (negative!). A game will then be resigned for the weaker side if the values of the engines is lower than 5 pawns for 6 half moves.

If the maximum game length is exceeded, the game is adjudicated a draw.

The Autoflag setting you select here will be used for the tournament. Please note that "Autoflag" should be set to "on" normally, because even with the best engines there might happen some problems and the tournament can not continue if an engine hangs.

You can set the "Ponder" option separately for tournaments. This does not affect the general setting under Engines / Ponder. Pondering makes of course only sense if you are the lucky owner of a computer with at least two CPUs or cores. If you have only one CPU, this option does not make sense, because the time for the engines is often not evenly distributed (50%-50%). This can happen even under Windows NT/2000/XP operating systems.

[_] Tab Sheet Files:

The general recommendation is to save all tournament files in the Arena subdirectory "Tournaments".

You can save all games in a PGN file. All data you have chosen under OptionsarrowAppearancearrowPGN will be saved. You must use this option, if you want to calculate ratings with ELOStat later.

The protocol file saves all results of the games and some statistics. The search statistics in the protocol file is only valid for opening stage and middle game, not for the endgame. A position is regarded as an endgame position if at most 6 pieces (not pawns, white and black together) are present on the board. The queen counts twice.

The tournament table exists in two different forms: One simple for display in the Arena GUI (alternative to the move list, the tab "Table") during tournaments and one more complex in HTML form. The latter can be displayed in your Internet browser.

The button "Set default filenames" sets the following filenames to their default settings:

  • (Arena directory)\Tournaments\(Tournamentname).pgn for the games in PGN format
  • (Arena directory)\Tournaments\(Tournamentname).log for the protocol file
  • (Arena directory)\Tournaments\(Tournamentname).txt for the tournament table in text format
  • (Arena directory)\Tournaments\(Tournamentname). html for the tournament table in HTML
  • format

(Arena directory)\Tournaments\(Tournamentname).res for the individual results of the engines shown also under the tab "Results".

These names are also set by "Settings / New" or "Settings / Duplicate".

[_] Tab Sheet Table:

For the HTML table there are some options:

  • "Insert country": Shows the country from the participant in the table.
  • "Use flags": The flags of the countries are shown instead of the names.
  • "Flags from website": Loads the flag files not from the local PC, but
  • from the Arena website. This is important if you want to publish your tournaments on the Internet.
  • "Use English language": Shows the table in English language, not in
  • your local language. This is useful if you want to publish your tournaments to an international audience.
  • "Short results in table" doesn't show all the game results explicitly, e.g. 100=10 (1:win,0:loss,
  • =:draw), but only as a summary, e.g. 2-3-1. The latter means 2 wins, 3 losses and one draw. This option saves table space.
  • "Only points" means that the format is changed to the
  • format "my points/possible points". This would be in the above example, "2.5/6".
  • Show PGN filename: Shows a line in the tournament with the PGN filename.
  • PGN-URL: You can add a filename on the Internet here pointing to where
  • you have published the PGN file.
  • Insert author:Adds a column with the Author of the engine
  • Show the Web page of the author
  • Show Axon Benchmark: Shows the speed of your system
  • Show Win percent: Shows a % column in the table indicating the percent of won games
  • Show tournament conditions: Shows the tournament conditions as you enter them
  • in the following line
  • A click on "Get" sets the conditions to: hash size, table bases on/off , ponder on/off,
  • possible starting positions
  • Top line colorized: Select a colour for the top line of the tournament table.

The "S-B" column contains the Sonneborn-Berger fine rating value.

[_] Tab Sheet Pairings:

Here you see the list of all pairings of the tournament. The number of games yet to play is shown on top of the list. Behind the pairings the history of the results is shown: 1 means a win for the first engine,
0 a win of the second, 1/2 for a draw and ? stands for a game that has not been finished. Games that are not finished will be repeated.

With the button "Edit result" you can change the result of a pairing, because e.g. a game has not been started correctly or a different error has happened. In such a case you simply remember the round number of the game (or look it up in the PGN file) and set the result at this place to "?". Then this game will be replayed.

If you load a (partially) played tournament, only the games that are yet to be played will be played, if you don't change any settings. Eventually no games will be played, if the tournament is already finished. If you want to replay the tournament, you can press the "Reset to tournament start" button on the "Settings" tab.

[_] Tab Sheet Start/Quit:

If your computer should be shut down after the tournament has been finished, you can choose "Shutdown computer after tournament".

You can also shut down your computer after a number of games. This is helpful if you want to run your tournament in chunks and not all games in a row. Eventually the tournament will not be played to the end, but you can restart it any time later.

If you select " Quit Arena after tournament", Arena quits when the tournament is finished.

"Restart Arena after so many games": here you can set the number of games after that Arena quits and restarts itself. Arena then reloads the tournament and continues it. This is a great help for avoiding problems that may arise (memory leaks, not enough resources) if a tournament runs for a long time, e.g. days or weeks.

"Restart Arena at this hour": here you can set the hour Arena quits and restarts itself. You can avoid long-term problems this way too. If a game runs at this time, Arena waits until the game is over and then restarts itself.

Engines are restarted before every new pairing. If you want your engines to be restarted after each game, you also can select this here.

[_] Tab Sheet Blunder-Check:

This feature enables you to collect critical positions in which an engine has made an error (blunder) and save them in an EPD file. You can examine this file later and e.g. check an updated version of this engine and see if it makes less blunders.

If you check Enable Engine Blunder-Check this feature is activated.

Hint: Take a look at the Permanent Statistics window and imagine how you recognize a blunder. Normally you identify blunders by jumps in the evaluation.

When the conditions under "Trigger" are met, the position will be saved into the EPD file. You can set the threshold (if value decreases X centipawns), and the number of moves (within X moves) in which the decrease in value could have happened in. If you e.g. choose a high value for the decrease (say 500) here, only big blunders are saved to the EPD file, in this case in the range of the loss of a rook. If you choose a small value here, small mistakes are saved also. If you choose a higher number of moves (e.g. 10) also gradual changes in the position value are counted as errors and saved to the EPD file. The setting No blunder if already X centipawns down excludes bad moves that are made from a position that is already bad, since moves that worsen your position are often unavoidable if you are down quite a bit in your position.

Under Save critical position(s) in EPD file.. you can set from which move, going backward, the positions are saved. So you can save several positions, always going back one full move, as far back as you want. Often the error didn' t happen in the current move but one or two moves back. So it is recommended to save at least the current position and one full move back (resulting in the dialogue settings: from move 0 to move 1 move before).

The critical positions are saved into a file, which name is determined through the name of the engine and "_white" or "_black" appended. The file is located in the Arena-directory under "\Tournaments\Epd\", e.g.:

C:\Arena\Tournaments\Epd\Ruffian 2.0_white.epd and C:\Arena\Tournaments\Epd\Ruffian 2.0_black.epd.