I took a gamble backing the Chessnut Evo Kickstarter. The concept of it was appealing. After receiving the device I initially had mixed feelings. On the one hand I was disappointed with the built in chess engine implementation. Stockfish was severely hampered and the Maia bots played very poor chess when considering the level of the games they were trained with. The Lc0 engine is there but also severely hampered as there is no means for selecting level of play, thinking time or look-ahead. This also means that the feature to create our own bots from a database of games (a feature I was very interested in) is poor because if we train with Grandmaster games it will still play at beginner level, so hardly emulating the player. This is still the issue and why I've not bothered using this feature.

On the other hand, Chessnut has been very active with software updates and recent updates have addressed the Stockfish and Maia playing strength. You may have seen my 10 game matches of Maia Level 9 against the Chessgenius Pro 2024. There is a dramatic difference in playing strength. I highlighted that Maia always opened with P-K4 when playing white, but this has now been addressed by the inclusion of an openings book. I have posted a question on the Chessnut FB page asking what size this book is. It may be interesting to perform another match.

I agree with some of the comments about the Evo in that it came to market incomplete. However, I expected this with it being a Kickstarter campaign, which is always going to be a gamble, but I have to say, so far Chessnut seem committed in improving the Evo.

After my initial disappointment and discovering that third party applications such as PGN Master and Droidfish work very well and that now Maia gives very good and interesting games my overall impression is positive.

I hope to see an improvement with the Lc0 implementation and have asked Chessnut to add the ability to at least select depth of search. This would make our own trained bots play much better. They responded positively but time will tell if they implement this feature.

I can understand why the Evo would not be to everyone's taste, but for me it's interesting to witness the improvements being made and I think it has much potential.

Ray