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For this position, the eval bar on Chess.com (Stockfish 16.1 Lite, depth=20) says it's equal (image below).

I couldn't understand why (also, it's an anonymous game, so I don't have the analysis), so I used ChessVision (Stockfish (not sure what version), depth=20), and it says it's -5.9, and it seems correct (image below).

Why might Chess.com evaluate this as equal?

    [Title "White to move"]
    [FEN "1r1qk1nr/p2n1ppb/P3p2p/1QppP2P/Rb3PP1/2N1B3/2P5/1N2KB1R w Kk - 0 1"]

Chess.com:
enter image description here

ChessVision:
enter image description here

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    Could it be that the game was drawn by triple repetition (or that White's coming Qe2 would complete a triple repetition), and the evaluation took this into account? Commented Jul 31 at 22:59
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    @NoamD.Elkies the game was indeed drawn by triple repetition. So you think that's the reason for this eval bar? I actually "manually" analyzed my (anonymous) game by continuing it in various ways and jumped back and forth between positions, but every time i got back to the original ending position, the eval bar moved to 0.0. I hadn't realized that's what happens, I'd say it's an unexpected behavior, but so be it. Thanks!
    – OfirD
    Commented Jul 31 at 23:22

1 Answer 1

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Your evaluation as black being much better seems to be correct. However, I would argue that neither of the evaluations you provided is accurate.

As for the chess.com evaluation, I think your result is incorrect due to a network/server error of some sort because I can't seem to reproduce your results (Edit: Discrepancy in result is due to game being drawn at this position as OP has clarified in comments). Here's my result of chess.com's engine at depth = 20 using Stockfish 16.1 Lite: (-3.43)

Chess.com evaluation of position

For Chessvision, using the Chrome extension, I got -6.2 for this position using Stockfish HCE at depth 20 (which is similar to your reported evaluation of -5.9)

Chessvision evaluation of position

To compare these results, let us consider few more evaluations: (click on the image to view in full size)

  • Lichess stockfish 11 using HCE gave the evaluation of -6.8 at depth = 20.

Lichess evaluation using HCE

  • Lichess stockfish 16 using NNUE gave the evaluation of -3.5 at depth = 20.

Lichess evaluation using NNUE at depth 20

  • And finally, Lichess stockfish 16 using NNUE gave the evaluation of -4.0 at depth = 30

Lichess evaluation using NNUE at depth 30

In order to understand the reason for difference in these evaluations, one must know the difference between Stockfish HCE, Stockfish NNUE and Stockfish Lite.

Stockfish HCE was basically using handcrafted evaluation functions to evaluate a given position and did not actively learn from games played in similar positions. See this recent question to understand the pitfalls of handcrafted evaluation.

Then came Stockfish NNUE (Efficiently Updatable Neural Network in reverse) which use neural nets to add learning capability to the above handcrafted evaluation function. Introduction of NNUE has made HCE model obsolete (Since July 2023, HCE model has been removed by Stockfish)

Finally, chess.com's Stockfish Lite is in the process of transitioning from HCE model to smaller NNUEs. (link)

Hence, the most accurate engine evaluations among all of the above at this point in time would be Stockfish 16 using NNUE at depths 20 (-3.5) and 30 (-4.0).

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