Customizing Opening and Endgame Training Databases For the ChessBase Interface?

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.

Creating Tactics Problem Sets From Your Games Using ChessBase Products

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).

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Rybka 3 Monte Carlo Analysis: Fixed!

Commenter Stalemate gave a fix to my Rybka 3 problem with Monte Carlo analysis. I had to tweak his suggestion to fit the Vista folder hierarchy.

Basically, copy of the contents of the c:\Program Files\Common Files\ChessBase\Engines.uci\ folder to a "local settings" folder. You may need to turn on the ability to see hidden files to do this.

Stalemate's destination folder:c:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Local Settings\Temp\ (where xxx is your user name). This appears to be for Windows XP.

For my Vista laptop, the path was c:\users\xxx\AppData\Local\Temp\

Note: you're not copying the Engines.uci folder to the Temp directory, but its contents (i.e. the .uci engines). At first I just copied the folder, and it didn't work.

I'll be letting ChessBase support know about this fix.

Rybka 3 Arrived, but...

My birthday gift to myself arrived...Deep Rybka 3 with the ChessBase interface. Unfortunately, one of the features I was most interested in--Monte Carlo analysis-- isn't working. Shortly after starting the analysis, the program crashes.

I just contacted ChessBase support. Hopefully the issue will be resolved in time for my birthday! I'm curous, though, if other readers have had a similar problem and know a solution.