I have just started tweaking the opening and endgame training databases that shipped with my ChessBase version of Rybka 3. Here’s what I’ve determined so far:
I have Rybka 3 with the ChessBase interface (Fritz11 generation), but its main use for my has been analyzing games. I haven’t used the training features much, and I do most of my work in ChessBase itself with the Rybka 3 engine running. However, while digging through the help files I realized that the databases the Openings Trainer and Endgame Trainer use are customizable.
That means, for example, that if I cleaned up my personal openings book in ChessBase I should be able to play against my own repertoire. Or, I can take the endgames from a book such as 100 Endgames You Must Know and play the positions against the computer (something I’ve done in the past, but manually, endgame by endgame).
I’m considering playing around with this feature and sharing my results. If any of my readers have tried this, share your experiences.
{Edit: funny thing about horizons--as you approach them, they recede. Keep watching for CPT4, but don't hold your breath.}
I’ve never fully utilized Chess Position Trainer 3.3, but I’m excited to hear that the Chess Position Trainer 4.0 beta may be released in the next few days.
Apparently they had already released a buggy preview version in early January.
I’ve been making do with ChessBase for openings, but CB is designed around being a game/position database, not an opening variations database. Yes, you can manage a repertoire in it, but it’s clunky, especially when it comes to transpositions. The main reason I never used CPT much was that I found it easier to focus on one database program than two.
I’ve been a very good boy the last 3 months or so, barely looking at opening theory. I’m feeling the itch, though, so if/when CPT 4 is released I may give it a test run while working on my Sicilian as White repertoire.
I was surprised to find two examples of the same unusual mating pattern in the tactics subset I created before Christmas. In the first position, I was losing anyways, but allowed an immediate resolution:
{ Edit: Whoops, a last-minute picture swap introduced the wrong position. Fixed now--GP}
Continuing (at long last) with the theme of simple tactics data-mined from my own games, here’s a position that seems straight out of Heisman. If I can find where the heck I left my copy of his Back to Basics: Tactics, I have a nagging suspicion that he’s covered the same tactic. Analyze 1.Bg5:
I’ve played a lot of blitz online. A LOT of blitz. It seemed to me that if these games could be mined for tactical errors, they would make an ideal set of simple tactics problems for drills. Manually mining them for gold, however, would take forever. I routinely store and analyze my blitz games, but have been negligent in saving positions into databases for tactics or blunders (a project I started but didn’t keep up with).
One day I thought: what if I take Rybka and tell it to analyze the games to a depth of 5 ply? That should roughly correspond to a Chernev and Reinfeld-ish “Seeing Three Moves Ahead” or simpler level of tactics, and should be fairly quick. I was familiar with the ChessBase interfaces for Rybka and Fritz and new that it could automatically generate “Training Annotations”: when you load the game or position, it jumps to a position and opens a window prompting you for the correct move. I decided to test this idea with my 800 most recent Blitz games (about 10% of my total games on record).
