Silicon Road: Chess Variants: pawnsideways chess! GM vs Fairy Fish, Game 5! Semi-Slav with a twist!

Back in 2020, DeepMind published an interesting paper in collaboration with ex-World Champion Vladimir Kramnik which investigated a series chess variants together with AlphaZero ("Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess" available from https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04374)
Everyone had their own favourite but mine was pawnsideways chess in which pawns can move sideways one square! A very simple change to the rules with profound and fascinating consequences!
Where can you play pawnsideways chess? Unfortunately, the variant is not yet supported at Lichess or at https://www.pychess.org but you can play it on chess.com. The most intersting place to play online however is on the Fairy-Stockfish playground at https://fairyground.vercel.app/index.... Fairy Stockfish you ask? Yes while Leela is queen of odds chess, Stockfish is the GOAT at variants so I have been challenging it... with varying degrees of success as you will see in these videos. It's also possible to play pawnsideways chess with Fairy Stockfish offline (https://fairy-stockfish.github.io/) together with Winboard. I will make an article and video explaining how to do that as it's a little fiddly - a big thanks to the friendly people at Fairy-Stockfish Discord for helping me on my way!
This was a pretty tough and long game where I got hit by an evil tactic just when I thought I was getting on top!

I’m grandmaster Matthew Sadler, a 2-times British Champion, and ranked in the world’s top 50 for many years. I’m also a prolific author. My latest book "Re-Engineering the Chess Classics" appeared in May 2023. It uses the techniques described in "The Silicon Road to Chess Improvement" to analyse afresh thirty-five of the most fascinating and complex chess games ever played by World Champions and other top grandmasters.

"Re-Engineering the Chess Classics" is available from here:
https://www.newinchess.com/re-enginee... (Paperback English edition)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Re-Engineeri... (Paperback English edition)

"The Silicon Road to Chess Improvement" – which came out in October 2021 is, just like this channel, all about learning from and training with engines. My previous book, the award-winning Game Changer – written together with Natasha Regan – brought the amazing chess games of DeepMind’s AlphaZero to the world.

The Silicon Road to Chess Improvement is available from here:
https://www.newinchess.com/engine-tra... (Paperback English edition)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/905... (Paperback and Kindle)
https://forwardchess.com/product/the-... (Digital)

"Game Changer" came out on 20th January 2019 and won the prestigious ECF Book of the Year and FIDE Book of the Year prizes for 2019! The Game Changer chess book is available in print and digital versions from these links:
http://newinchess.com/game-changer (Paperback English edition)
https://forwardchess.com/product/game... (Digital)
https://www.chessable.com/game-change... (Digital)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/905... (Paperback and Kindle)
https://www.amazon.de/Zeitenwende-Sch... (Hardback German edition)

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