Syzygy tablebases allow perfect play with up to 7 pieces, both with and without the fifty-move drawing rule, i.e., they allow winning all won positions and bringing all drawn positions over the fifty-move line.
syzygy tablebases download
Syzygy tablebases are the latest and most reliable resource to enhance the speed and the computing precision of the endgames. In order to use them you must have a recent Chessbase chess program, the Droidfish app for android or the free Arena GUI.
EVERY tablebases, whether is the 3-4-5 pieces or the 6 pieces, must be run on a VERY FAST storage, like an SSD drive or an USB pen. The essential one is the 3-4-5 pieces database, so you can just buy an USB pen if you don't want or can't spend money to buy an expensive device like an SSD drive.The fundamental part, both for mobiles and personal computers, is the 3-4-5 archive. Different facts are for the 6 MAN Syzygy: being sized 150 GB you must download it by installing a torrent client (be aware of the unwanted programs they are asking at the installation process). The one I feel to suggest is Bittorrent.
Congratulations to Bojun Guo (aka noobpwnftw) and Ronald de Man (aka syzygy) for completing the first free 7-piece tablebase and generously sharing it with the world! Lichess now provides online access on the analysis board and in studies, practice against tablebases, a public API and a mirror for downloading the full tablebase files.
DTZ means distance to zeroing of the counter for the 50-move drawing rule. Syzygy tablebases do not aim for the fastest way to mate, but rather for the fastest way to make a winning capture or pawn move or give mate. This can be a bit unintuitive, but it allows perfect play (with regard to outcome) even under the 50-move rule.
The number of unique legal 7-piece positions is 423,836,835,667,331. Syzygy tablebases store all their information in 18.4 TB, so at around 0.35 bits per position. This is much more compact than the proprietary 100 TB Lomonosov tablebases.
As a developer you may be interested in probing tablebases via a public HTTP API (feel free to suggest improvements), in C with the original probing code or a library (currently 6 piece only), in C++ by adjusting Stockfish, in Python or in Rust.
All 7 men files' size is over 16.7 TiB, over storages of typical modern computers. They also require a long time to download too. Thus some users choose to download one or a few endgames only, based on their statistics of use in endgames. Bellow is the top 20 of those endgames by their order. The first one, KRPPvKRP, has a significantly higher frequency of use than the others and should be always downloaded:
Although chess endgame tablebases are nothing new, many users still do not use them, not because they are unaware of their benefits or existence, but because acquiring them and installing them became an unnecessarily complicated stumbling block. This guide hopes to clarify the various aspects of what they are, how to acquire them and, naturally, how to install them.
Put simply, tablebases are complete databases that provide perfect answers for a set number of pieces. In other words, a five-piece tablebase set, which knows all the positions for five pieces would be able to instantly tell you the answer for any position with the two kings plus any three pieces. Have a position with king, rook and pawn versus king and rook? The answers are there.
You might think this is fairly academic, but there is a further use that is not just about you consulting the mystical tablebase oracle for the answer: your engine can use them. Whether it be Deep Fritz 14, or Houdini 4 (and many others), these engines can not only use these tablebases but refer to them in their analysis and as a result play much better in endgames.
Since tablebases include every position, every result, and the number of moves to mate (if there is one) for billions of positions, they can take up a lot of space. As a result, new competing formats come out trying to reduce the size on a regular basis. Although there are a number of types out there, this guide will focus on only three: Nalimov, Gaviota, and Syzygy, as these are the ones supported in the latest Deep Fritz 14 or Houdini 4 interface. Syzygy is new and especially desirable if you own Houdini 4.
Syzygy tablebases - They are the newest kid on the block and has the singular advantage of requiring the least amount of space (less than 1 GB for five-piece set) and is especially recommended for Houdini 4. The reason is that Houdini 4 was designed to make the most of them and it increases its overall strength more than any other. They can be downloaded here. Engines supported: Houdini 4.
For the Syzygy EGTB support you'll need to install the Syzygy EGTB files. At the time of writing all the Syzygy files are available for torrent download at The 3-4-5-men Syzygy are also available for direct download at
For the Nalimov EGTB support you'll need to install the Nalimov EGTB files. At the time of writing they are available for download at the address or Download the files and save them in a directory on your hard disk. The total disk space required for the 3-4-5-men table bases is about 7 GB (290 files). The space requirement for the 6-men Nalimov table bases exceeds 1 TB.
Access to the tablebases improves the playing strength of the program in the endgame considerably. Whenever it hits on one of the five-piece endings in the search, it can stop and get a completely accurate assessment of the position from the tablebases. It does not have to generate thousands of follow-up positions. But, accessing the tablebases is quite slow (in comparison to the move generation and evaluation). You can speed things up by copying the tablebases onto your hard disk.
For the Gaviota EGTB support you'll need to download the Gaviota EGTB files. At the time of writing they are available for download at the address all 145 files and save them in a directory on your hard disk. The total disk space required is about 7 GB.
The benefit of using the tablebases should be obvious to any. Even though computer chess experts argue that the precision of the knowledge is almost exactly offset by the fractional loss in speed when it analyzes endgames, anyone who has seen the engine produce wildly optimistic evaluations due to a misunderstanding of rook endgame realities, or material imbalance that has no hope of winning, will appreciate being able to trust the evaluation and not ask themselves whether this position is one of those exceptions.
The easiest solution is to install the files on an SSD. These are digital storage devices, much like a pendrive, that can be used like a hard disk, but are many many times faster. They have many benefits that exceed tablebases of course. Booting up a computer in which the operating system was installed will take a fraction of the time it would on a normal hard disk. If you have ever found yourself tired of waiting for a program to open or close, SSDs will more or less end that issue.
In many ways, this is the Goldilocks solution, providing enormous performance improvements, without the SSD's cost, and completely workable on a laptop as well. It also means you can use the tablebases on a laptop even if you do not have a DVD drive to install them from.
Why would you want to do this? If you do not have an SSD or a pendrive, want the tablebases, but are suffering from slowdowns, you can use the following compromise: use only the five-piece set. Since they are under 1 GB, and can easily fit in the computer's RAM.
If you find yourself having to use this last scenario as a solution, I strongly suggest you get a pendrive for the six-piece set. The cost is small, but the information those six-piece tablebases add is truly not to be underestimated. It means that everytime its search leads to one of those situations with six pieces, it can stop searching as it knows exactly the result and evaluation.
Enter the path of the folder where the Syzygy tablebases are stored in the "GUI" and "Engine" tabs. Clicking on the button with the three dots activates the standard Windows dialog to select the folder. Click OK to confirm the settings, and the program will now use the information in the tablebases.
In this example you can see entries "tb= xxx", which show how often the Houdini chess engine is accessing the endgame tablebases. A big advantage of the Syzygy Endgame Tablebases is that they are much smaller. The 6-man Syzygy tablebases need 150 GB disc space, whereas the Nalimov tablebases need more than 1 TB.
For instance, the Komodo chess engine only uses the Syzygy tablebases during the search, but it also uses the Nalimov tablebases when a position is on the board. It is to be expected that the Syzygy tablebases will become increasingly popular with engine developers.
The Syzygy tablebases support bitbases in both WDL and DTZ format. The latter format is only used when an exact position is already on the board. However, only the number of moves to reach another endgame (or sometimes checkmate). Another endgame begins after any move that resets the 50 move rule. By this definition, every time a piece is taken or a pawn moves a new endgame has begun and the count is set to 1. If a pawn keeps advancing, after every move the count is 1 again. That means that the count is reset after every move which changes the position irreversibly.
This means that the Syzygy Endgame Tablebases are different to the tablebases that have been used until now. This means that the moves to mate are not necessarily displayed, but the moves to the transition into another endgame. When sorting the moves pawn, capture and promotion moves are put first, because these are the moves that bring the game forwards.
As in the case of the Nalimov tablebases there are 290 files for the 3/4/5-piece endgames, but they are differently distributed. The Nalimov tablebases have two files per endgame, one for "White To Move", one for "Black To Move". The Syzygy tablebases only need one file, regardless of who is moving, but there are two versions of each tablebase: one contains the WDL (Win-Draw-Loss) result and the other contains the DTZ (Distance-To-Zero) result. 2ff7e9595c
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