“Smerdon Beats Komodo 5-1 With Knight Odds”, Peter Doggers2020-04-13 ()⁠:

GM David Smerdon defeated chess engine Komodo, playing with knight odds, 5–1. The Man vs. Machine rapid match was played on Chess.com on April 10 and 11 and provided more insight into the effect of material imbalance in human vs engine play…It was the first formal match on record in which a grandmaster takes knight odds in rapid (as opposed to blitz) chess from any opponent.

A knight is a knight—even for Komodo.

While many experts, including grandmasters, predicted Smerdon to lose the match with big numbers, the Australian grandmaster was right when he noted on his website before the match:

Still, Komodo may be Komodo, but a knight is a knight (to paraphrase Mikhail Tal). A rapid game is nowhere near as long as a classical game, but neither is it the tactical lottery of a blitz match, so in theory, I should be able to avoid outrageous blunders…My odds match against Komodo is over, with me prevailing by 5 wins to one. It turns out that “the knight is just too strong” (Evgenij Miroshnichenko), even though about 75% of the pre-game predictions were for a computer victory (including by many grandmasters, correspondence players, computer experts—and my wife). It turns out that the trade-off between chess strength and chess odds is really difficult to estimate. But others had a better sense (Peter Svidler).

[This is particularly striking because some claim that knight-odds is an impossible handicap, especially as human players have grown greatly in strength due to chess engines; yet Komodo still won a game, despite its handicaps: Komodo isn’t the best chess engine then or now, didn’t use as much computer hardware as quite feasible, wasn’t targeted to Smerdon with a customized opening book or anything like the preparation Smerdon has doubtless done in the past, this was back in 2020, and chess engines aren’t trained with knight-odds (or any handicaps?) to begin with.]

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Smerdon Beats Komodo 5-1 With Knight Odds