Game Phases

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The textbook division of game phases enumerates three of them:

• Opening
• Middlegame
• Endgame

In the opening, the focus is on development, in the middlegame - on attack and defense, in the endgame - on pawn promotion and realization of the material advantage.

Whereas this definition is good enough for humans, coding it in a straightforward manner would introduce evaluation discontinuity in many places. For that reason many programs define several game phases, based on the amount of material on the board.

See also

• Development
• Evaluation Discontinuity
• Multiple Piece-Square Tables
• Stockfish Evaluation Guide
• Tapered Eval

Forum Posts

2015 ...

• From midgame to endgame: help needed by Stephane Nicolet, FishCooking, September 17, 2015 » Stockfish
• Anomaly of Stockfish eval depending on phases of the game by Kai Laskos, CCC, May 05, 2016
• is phase a good indicator of game progress? by Alexandru Mosoi, June 23, 2016 » Tapered Eval
• Early / middle / end game transitions? by notachessplayer, OpenChess Forum, February 19, 2017
• A different approach: how to avoid endgames with slight advantage - insufficient to win by ig.u...@gmail.com, FishCooking, October 22, 2017
• mg vs eg eval by Joost VandeVondele, FishCooking, October 06, 2019 » Middlegame, Endgame, Stockfish

2020 ...

• NNUE and game phase by Dann Corbit, CCC, January 18, 2021 » NNUE

External Links

• Outline of chess from Wikipedia
• Stockfish Evaluation Guide » Stockfish Evaluation Guide
• Phases of a Chess Game by Mark Weeks

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