LittleBlitzer: Chess Tournament Manager
LittleBlitzer is a free Windows tournament manager program for UCI based chess engines. It was created to enable playing thousands of very fast games using multiple threads for chess engine testing purposes. It creates a PGN file designed to be used by Bayeselo or Elostat to give a final rating for each chess engine. It is useful for both chess programmers and chess testers as you can run tens of thousands of games at fast time controls in a fraction of the time you could with a traditional GUI interface.
Some of the major features:
- Can allocate per-engine time with sub-millisecond accuracy.
- Very low tournament overheads so you can allocate every available CPU to the chess engines. Utilises LittleThought's efficient move generation code to maximise performance.
- Can run multiple engine vs engine games in parallel - for example, on a 4-core machine you can run 4 single-cpu matches, or on a 8-core machine you can run 4 dual-cpu matches.
- Displays real time statistics on each engine's performance, and distinguishes between different types of game results such as loss by timeout or loss by illegal move.
- Outputs PGN file for direct import into Bayeselo.
- Supports Gauntlet or Round-Robin tournaments.
- Supports Standard or Chess960 variants.
- All engines can be configured separately.
- Can set tournament level settings such as hash table size and time controls.
- Can adjudicate games early based on specified criteria, to further speed up the tournament.
- Supports starting positions loaded from FEN, EPD or PGN files.
Downloads/Links
Download LittleBlitzer 2.74
Includes GUI binary and usage instructions.
Download LittleThought 1.052 64-bit
Includes binary, logo and small opening book.
Download LittleThought 1.052 32-bit
Includes binary, logo and small opening book.
Remi Coulum's Site
His Bayesian Elo rating tool is essential for any chess testing.
Also has a great PGN to EPD converter and many other tools.
Change History
LittleBlitzer v2.74 (06/06/2012)
- Added extra decimal of precision to the avg depth per engine output. Because stats are awesome.
LittleBlitzer v2.73 (21/05/2012)
- Forced all moves output to lower case to handle engines that output upper case moves and engines that cannot handle them as input.
LittleBlitzer v2.72 (20/04/2011)
- Fixed output of some empty PGN games.
LittleBlitzer v2.71 (10/04/2011)
- Fixed calculation of adjudication by score loss.
- PGN and EPD files used for opening positions may now have spaces in their paths.
- Fixed ambiguity in algebraic notation used (e.g. Rdd4 instead of R3d4).
- Added number of opening positions to results display.
- Fixed output of first move as white.
LittleBlitzer v2.7 (25/03/2011)
- Added option to output full PGN of games. Testing shows no measurable slowdown.
- Can read starting positions from PGN files.
LittleBlitzer v2.6 (22/02/2011)
- Fixed parsing of FEN starting postitions.
- Fixed bug with identifying mate and stalemate positions.
LittleBlitzer v2.5 (10/11/2010)
- Fixed number of games played in total and per engine. Will now always play the exact number asked.
- Fixed reporting of illegal move when it should have been a repetition draw.
- Each illegal move now generates a new file with a random suffix.
- Some GUI tweaking.
- Improved logging output.
- Reduced LB overheads and more accurate measurement of real time taken by engines.
- Added option to pick a random EPD position (defaults to sequential).
- Added LB_Name engine parameter to overwrite engine's name in the results.
LittleBlitzer v2.4 (23/08/2010)
- Added Adjudication parameters to help speed up games
- Added additional time controls (fixed time per move + tournament x moves in y secs)
- Added dialog to edit tournament settings
- Some general polishing to make it more user friendly
LittleBlitzer v2.3 (10/08/2010)
- Can now specify starting positions via the Position parameter (fixed or EPD of positions)
- Fixed some illegal move reporting problems
- Modified engines file format, now accepts UCI parameters
LittleBlitzer v2.2 (04/08/2010)
- Added Chess960 support (Variant = 1)
- Added some error checking when loading engines and support for path names with spaces
- Enhanced illegal move dump file
- Can now log the first engine's communications (best used with single tournaments)
- Now works on old XP installations without the VC redist
- Increased max threads to 16
LittleBlitzer v2.1 (15/03/2010)
- Supports Gauntlet or Round Robin tournaments
- Supports up to 4 parallel tournaments
- Designed to play extremely fast, e.g. all moves in 1 sec
- Pondering is not enabled yetFixed illegal move bug encountered when playing long games (> 200 moves)