OpenChess

I've been toying with engine matches past week or 2, Houdini 5.01 clobbers both stockfish 8 and Komodo 11.2 on my PC, i7 980x engines all use 12 threads.

They can barely win a single game, so stockfish being #1 is fishy. Maybe special settings i dunno, just using defaults here + 12 threads.

Anyone have explanation?

PS I've been using Fixed depth 16/Ply, not sure what the standard is.

Fixed-depth is worse than pointless. It favors the engine that prunes least, i.e. that wastes most time on searching poor lines. Even TSCP would beat Houdini at 16 ply. (It would take a few months per move to reach 16 ply, of course.)

Standard is fixed time per game or session, where engines that won't waste time on poor lines, but use that time to reach higher depth on the promising lines instead, are strongest.

ah ok thanks, looks like that's accurate, 7 draws so far on 10 min Long game 40 moves so now the chess engine world makes more sense