Tiger Trekker is an interesting old chess computer I found on eBay a few years ago. Till then, I was mainly collecting regular chess computers from the 1980s and 90s. This one has a portable design. It has a peg sensory board, so its tiny pieces can be used to register moves with the computer. There is not a whole lot of information on these computers but they were sold in 1997 before the time smartphones became a thing. Mine has a LCD display to show the moves. It has a 2 MHz processor.
There is no official ELO list that covers tiny computers like this but this one has apparently an estimated rating of around 1400 ELO. I was skeptical about that, so I decided to put it to the test against ChessUp 2. This is the smartest chess computer on the market with an estimated rating of 3200 ELO. It is also educational as it shows move quality with different light colors. It also lets you play on Lichess and Chess.com.
Not surprisingly, Tiger Trekker didn’t put up much of a fight. It started OK but then got its pieces trapped, including its queen. The main issue started happening when the computer started getting greedy with pawn captures while ignoring the other side of the board. The Tiger Trekker is not super strong but can still be a great learning tool for chess. It doesn’t play like a modern engine but you will still need to know how to play good chess to exploit its mistakes.
[HT]
