Sorry, I've never played ICCF games (and I don't even have a FIDE rating, I guess it would be 1600-1700, i.e. I'm a club level patzer); what I played were chess.com games, where no engines or tablebases are allowed (but opening databases and manual analysis on a board are OK).
I'm afraid these formats are too different. The chess.com games are more about how deep you can (and have time to) calculate manually, thus choosing offbeat tactical openings and then just playing good chess and dedicating enough time to analysis works decently.
But if I were facing someone equipped with an engine, I'd avoid positions where tactical tricks are probable because engines see them perfectly. The way to outplay the engine is, like you've said with regard to Bayonet, reach positions that have longterm strategic plans that engines are unable to understand.
The advice about offbeat openings (to throw engines out of their books) still stands, but in ICCF games, they need to lead to quiet closed positions instead of sharp open ones. The Stonewall formation (with both colours) and the London are thought of as good examples. (With White, I'd prefer to develop the DSB to g5 or f4, though, before playing e3, so it would be more like Trompowsky Stonewall.)
Likewise, in the endgame, engines grossly overestimate the chances of the stronger side when the defender can build a fortress, so definitely get apter at recognising them. Engines generally fail at complex endgames (those with >7 pieces), so transitioning to the endgame early (if you end up in an open position) looks a good idea.
In general, I'd be looking for opening lines that lead to decent positions according to the manual analysis of the practical games in the line (there are few enough of them if the line is offbeat), but that are undervalued by engines.
A good thing about the way DBs work is that the total winrate or performance rating of a move that is shown to your opponent is the average over all your possible responses, but it might be the case that the most popular responses are bad for you but you have one response that others play very seldom but that is really great. In particular, you may abuse transpositions and manipulate the opponent into eventually walking into a line that's favourable to you.
I struggle to find a concrete example of such an approach that would suit your repertoire. What comes to mind, though it's not really a closed opening (but looks rather positional at first glance), is
the Neo-Indian (Seirawan) attack - 1. c4 Nf6 2. d4 e6 3. Bg5. (One of the points is 3... Bb4+ 4. Nd2 - the knight isn't blocking the bishop like it would in the Bogo. Yasser Seirawan is a specialist in anti-computer play, fwiw.) Its benefit is that it often transposes to the QGD or leads to Trompowsky-like offbeat lines, which is a nuisance to a Black player who's better prepared for the Nimzo or Bogo Indian.
The game may continue
3... Be7 4. Nc3 (Black will be out of book unless he transposes to QGD)
d5 5. a3!? - that looks like a solid deviation, and of course it's not a total waste of time, as it prepares b4. (The thing is that e3, a3, Rc1, Qc2, in any order, seems to be often played later anyway in the Orthodox QGD; but here I'd like to leave the opponent with an uneasy feeling of being thrown out of book if he doesn't know the ins and outs of the QGD; neither do I, it's just an example of the power of transposition).
There are a ton of sources on anti-engine play, here are two articles by Rafael Leitão (both an ICCF and FIDE GM) that I like (you've probably read them already because I mentioned them in
a similar post in January that is about my approach to chess.com CC and not fully applicable to ICCF, but I want to make sure you don't miss them):
Ideas on how to prepare a good opening repertoire
Modern day analysis – working with the computer
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I've looked up ICCF's site and was a bit shocked by the fact that the World Cup is going to take 6 years to be finished... That's a ton of time. Do you know what your life would look like in 5-6 years? I don't. I need to get resettled first to remotely consider committing to such a long tourney
As for the 7-piece tablebases, don't worry: apparently
ChessOK, despite charging $20 lifetime for 7-piece TB use from those who have neither Aquarium nor Chess Assistant, has a free Android app that can query them (of course they're too big to be installed on a PC anyway - 140 terabytes). Obviously, Android can be emulated on Windows via BlueStacks
(I haven't tried to run ChessOK there, though; I was able to launch the Ladbrokes poker app back in 2014, though it was painfully slow). 6-piece TBs are free to query in Windows browsers as well.
Last edited by coon74; 08-27-2015 at 05:40 AM.