QuicklyBored

Although we mentioned this a long time ago, we are only now coming out with the first installment of our QuicklyBored Guide to Mobile Chess. When we started this guide, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

Just to recap, the QB Guide to Mobile Chess involves playing the mobile chess engine in question against Fritz, a powerful pc chess engine, and getting the ELO rating from Fritz’s analysis (follow the link if you don’t know what an ELO rating is).

Once we have the ELO rating, we can give you a good understanding of how good the chess engine is. After collecting all the ELO ratings for each game we are going to review, we will announce the winner.

The best method to discover what ELO rating you have reached is to play a number of Rated Games against Fritz. In order to get an accurate measurement, we played the mobile game against Fritz about 20 times. Way more work than we thought. The PC engine was set at the easiest difficulty and the mobile engines set at the hardest. We’re clearly trying to make this an even battle.

Our first mobile chess engine was ZingMagic’s Chess. Fritz consistently won these games and ZingMagic’s chess was of little difficulty. As expected, the ELO rating matched this performance. ZingMagic received an ELO rating of 1257 which corresponds to a D rating.

Not only did this game receive a bad ELO rating, but the controls were very awkward. The game wouldn’t move me in the right positions. It would take a while before I could get the cursor to move onto the appropriate square. This made it especially difficult to play the two engines against each other.

Other than that, this was a chess game with the absolute bare necessities. There wasn’t much in terms of options and features.

Being the first chess game reviewed, it is hard to say what the competition will provide but hopefully we can do better than a D class ELO rating.