guidopetri / chess-pipeline

Pulling games from the Lichess API into a PostgreSQL database for data analysis.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Piece worth in time #42

Open guidopetri opened 4 years ago

guidopetri commented 4 years ago

How much is a bishop worth, in time units?

Sometimes, you can get away with playing a bullet game and blundering your queen away if the opponent only has a few seconds left on the clock. As long as the position is complicated enough (or even if it isn't, really, and you just have good mouse skills), your opponent simply can't move fast enough to beat you/prevent a draw by timeout vs insufficient material.

I can use the data that's being gathered here to evaluate how much time your opponent has to have on the clock before you can safely blunder a bishop away and still have good odds of getting away with it.

It'll probably be different depending on the timescale (e.g.: If a bishop is blundered with the opponent having 2s left on the clock, vs with 50s left on the clock in a bullet match), and there will (naturally!) be a lot of variance between opponents, but I think I can provide a pretty good estimate.