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’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).
Months ago I looked into chess applications for my iPod Touch and didn't find anything that grabbed me. I checked again this last weekend and found two I was quite pleased with. One is free, and one is ten bucks. Which is for you?
Glaurung is the free chess app. You can vary its playing strength on a scale from 0 to 100. You can play against it or analyze with it (best line only shown), and can set up positions. There are several different preset time controls, and you can tweak other options such as permanent brain, play style, and book variety. One advantage that Glaurung has is that it can save games or load them from a .pgn file. I have no idea where this .pgn file is located, or if it syncs to your computer, but it at least means you can save games.
Shredder has an app available for $10. What do you get for your money? First, you can vary the play strength from 850 to 2400 Elo (I can't independently verify the accuracy of its Elo scale, but I like it better than Glaurung's 0-100). It can also be set to automatically adjust its rating to your level as you play games. You can adjust its play style, and can turn on a coach feature. The one main drawback to Shredder is that, at least in the current version, you cannot save your game. However, you can email it.
One final edge that Shredder has is that it has a database of 1000 test positions built into it that you can solve. The points you get for each puzzle depends both on accuracy and speed of solving. I like this feature a lot, although for some of the positions it says "you have solved this puzzle" after getting the first few moves correct, when I would still like to see a few moves further into the solution. this isn't a big deal, though, because you can stop the quiz and select "play this position".
So far my conclusion is: Shredder has the advantage if you're looking for a program to play against. The Elo rating with a sliding scale and automatic adjustment to match your play level is a nice feature, and I really like the puzzle feature. However, if you want to be able to save your games (e.g. if you don't have email access and can't email the game to yourself), or if you're thrifty, Glaurung is really quite nice. Both look attractive, and both appear to be hideously strong (I'm worried about the consequences this technology will have on tournament play). If you're serious about chess, and can already afford an iPhone or iTouch, then I don't think you'll regret purchasing Shredder...but you can download Glaurung first and then decide if you really want or need more.
I scored an iPod Touch for my birthday. I saw that there are several chess apps available, but I get the impression that the reviews are grossly padded by developer sockpuppets.
Anyone have iPod/iPhone chess apps that they particulary like? I noticed that at least one (Caissa Chess) mentions playing by email. This is of some interest, since I'm currently playing a pair of email games with someone from the club.
I received my Sony Vaio SR laptop today. So far, so good. I've managed to put ChessBase 9, Fritz 9 and CT-ART on it and test them out. The latter two required some googling to figure out how to get them to work in Vista, but everything seems to check out so far. I'm not looking forward to transferring the 4 GB of endgame tablebases over.
Fritz 9 is running at over double the kN/s on the laptop. I'm tempted to try playing my two computers against each other and see how the laptop stacks up.
I've started to shop around for Rybka. I'm interested in picking up other free engines that I can pit against each other in engine tournaments. If anyone has some favorite engines, feel free to share your thoughts.
I was going over some of the basic endgames from L. Polgar's Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games. The book's analysis for Position #5113 is incorrect: Black surprisingly can draw!
White To Play
When using the program Chess Tactics for Beginners, one shouldn't unquestioningly accept their answers. Sometimes there are alternate solutions to the problems that aren't accepted as correct answers. But you should also question their evaluations of variations.
The following problem was interesting. White to draw:
Note: for the following analysis, I'm trying to abide by the Nunn Convention for annotating endgames, hence the extensive use of "!". It's not just me being over-excited. (Technically, some of them might really be "!?", because other moves waste time but don't actually give away the win, but close enough.)
The move 1.Ng1! indeed does lead to a draw, as shown by 1...c1(Q) =. However, the software also gives the following line as a draw: 1...Kf5 2.Ne2 Ke4 3.Kg1 Kd3 4.Kf1 Kd2=. I've checked this with Fritz, and 1...Kf5? actually appears to lose for Black! The main theme appears to be that the white Knight can prevent the c-pawn from promoting (either from e2 or a2, as required) while White queens the h-pawn.
After 1.Ng1!= Kf5?-+ 2.Ne2! Ke4 3.Kg1! Kd3 4.Kf2! (instead of CTB's 4.Kf1?=):
For example, 4...Kd2 5.Kf3! Kd1 6.Nc3+:
It seems clear that Black cannot queen the c-pawn. However, I wasn't ready to trust Fritz yet. I wondered: is it possible that Black can draw the rook-pawn endgame, as I discussed in my previous post? Apparently not. One line continues: 6...Kd2 7.Na2 Ke1 (7...Kd3?! 8.Nb4+. This is a common theme in this, and other knight endgames: some squares such as d3 are "mined" because a king on that square falls victim to a knight fork that wins the offending pawn.) 8.Kg3 Ke2 9.Kxh3 Kf3 10.Kh4 Kf4 11.Kh5 Kf5 12.h4 Kf6 13.Kh6 Kf7 14.h5 Kg8 15.Kg6 Kh8 16.h6 Kg8:
We've followed the drawing procedure for K+RP vs. K, and it looks like Black will draw. However, after 17.Nc1! Kh8 18.Nd3! Kg8 19.h7! Kh8 20.Ne5!:
20...c1=Q 21.Nf7#.
Totally freakin' cool.
Translated: "Jeepers! I wish to obtain elite Chessbase hacking skills!"
Whereas my DVD on the French Defense by Ziegler has a spiffy database of annotated games that's easily accessed, the King Powerplay and the Muller Endgame DVDs have the game fragments embedded in the multimedia lessons.
I would like to be able to access the chessbase content itself, directly, for a couple reasons:
1. You can't enter your own variations. You can't hit pause and then say, "Yeah, but what if I play..." and explore your own line of inquiry.
2. I want to play the positions over versus Fritz.
The only way I've found to circumvent this is to pause each lesson (preferably near the end of the discussion, so all variations that were covered are present) and then use "save as..." to save it to a .cbh file of my own creation. It's a bit cumbersome, but it works.
One trick you can then do is open two game windows: one with the multimedia lesson playing, and another with your saved copy. You can right-click on the bottom of your screen in Windows and select "Tile windows vertically" (or horizontally, but I prefer the former) and get something that looks like this:
(I have no idea what happened to Muller's video image in the left window. Depending on what copy of the image file I was using, you could either see the bottom half of his head or nothing at all. Weird.)
The left window is the video lesson, and the right window is my own copy, with personal annotations and with Fritz+5-man tablebases providing assistance. With the above setup, I can pause the lesson at any point, and in my own game window check the variations with Fritz (hooray for tablebases!) and add my own commentary and variations. This is good, because when Muller gets the bit in his teeth he goes through variations at breakneck speed. Some of the endgames towards the end of his first DVD were just crazy. "check check check andnowdoyouseeit ofcourse! decisivezugzwangdecisivezugzwangdecisivezugzwang and the game is over decisivezugzwang decisevezugswang and...fatal...zugzwang"
Also, Muller very frequently points out positions that he feels should be played against Fritz or people at the chess club, in order to master them. You can indicate these moments in your copy of the game, and later load them into Fritz and practice them.
I very strongly recommend using such a two-window approach when viewing DVD lessons.
I'm about halfway through the first DVD in Daniel King's Powerplay series. I had viewed the second and third DVDs earlier this year, which deal with how to go about conducting an attack. I had found that the DVDs had a pronounced effect on my play, and that I had absorbed and retained a fair amount of the material.
I had postponed getting the first DVD on mating paterns, because I felt I had enough books on the subject and that I wouldn't gain that much from the DVD. After playing through much of the DVD, I realize...I was half right. Objectively, the material is "old hat". For example, the Greek Gift sacrifice is covered quite well in such works as Vukovic's Art of Attack in Chess, and Znozko-Borovsky's The Art of Chess Combination (both classics). I thought that the material on the Lasker double-bishop sacrifice was a bit skimpy as well. The videos are very enjoyable to watch, although in this first DVD there was some clumsiness early on as King figured out how the technology worked (aside: what does Chessbase have against editing?). Based solely on the content, however, I would think that the DVD was intended for beginners that hadn't studied mating patterns much (although the level of commentary indicates a more advanced target audience).
However, after going down to the chess club I found that once again King's DVD had planted ideas in my mind, and I had many successful attacks in my games. The Greek gift motif popped up in one of them, where I pushed h2-h4 to secure a g5 knight. Again, I found that although I was not consciously trying to be an attacker, or trying to force an attack where it wasn't justified, I was finding attacking motifs and applying them.
I feel that the DVD format, while perhaps delivering only a fraction of the information that a good book would, delivers that information more efficiently and more memorably. I've been highly satisfied with the other DVDs I've viewed (Ziegler's on the French Defense, and Muller's first endgame DVD). However, King's DVDs seem to have reached into my head and reprogrammed my brain. I feel like Neo from the Matrix....someone downloads a library into my skull and suddenly I know kung-fu.
The effect is pronounced enough that I may consider adding future Powerplay DVDs to my collection. Again, objectively the subject material (opening play; pawn structures) is adequately covered by book material I already have... but I'm left wondering if King has magic to work here as well.
I'll try to update this once I've finished the DVD. I also now have Muller's second and third endgame DVDs, and will likely review them at some point.
I've finished going through Daniel King's second and third DVDs in his Power Play series, and want to give my assessment of their utility to the club player. I have not viewed the first DVD in the series that deals with mating attacks. I will explain why at the end of this post.
First, a few relevant quotations:
"I can see the combinations as well as Alekhine, but I cannot get into the same positions."
-- Spielmann
"The player who is better must attack or risk losing the advantage"--Steinitz
"Properly taught, a student can learn more in a few hours than he would find out in ten years of untutored trial-and-error."--Em. Lasker
The two reviewed DVDs show how one initiates an attack so that you can get to the point of mating your opponent. The second DVD (Attacking the King) focuses on the idea of "inviting everyone to the party" by bringing pieces into the attack, in particular the heavy pieces. It also demonstrates the use of the g-pawn to crack open the g-file (particularly when the defender has played P-KR3). The third DVD focuses on pushing the f- and h-pawns.
I purchased these DVDs because I felt that, in my own games, I wasn't making the most of my attacking chances...I have a tendency to be risk-averse (although I do routinely sack a piece if I can get two defending pawns in exchange). However, I wondered if the DVDs would show example of example of sparkling attacks, and thereby encourage the viewer to launch into unjustified attacks in their own games. Then, through weakness of tactics and disregard of positional elements, their games would end in smoking ruins.
In short, these DVDs are an excellent example of Lasker's quote above. King provides a balanced, objective assessment of these attacks. In both DVDs, he has you pause the playback, set up the positions on a board, and think about the next move (in the second DVD, pauses during the lessons are common, and a few test positions are at the end of the DVD; in the third, there are fewer pauses in lessons but seventeen test positions at the end). Frequently, you are asked not for the attacker's next move but for the defender's. He shows not only attacks that break through but attacks that are ill-conceived. This approach adds instructional value, not only by encouraging a "real chess" approach (considering your opponent's responses) but by indirectly providing a primer on defence in chess. One benefit of learning mating patterns and attacks is so that, as a defender, you can see them looming and take prophylactic measures.
A strength of King's presentation is the use of repetition to drive home key concepts--and not just attacking principles, but general principles such as central control and space advantage. Here are some of the themes I detected:
I had heard that Nunn's book was out in a "New Enlarged Edition". I remember thumbing through the first edition years ago in the bookstores, gleaning a few nuggets of information from it but not committing to buying it. I hadn't planned on picking this second edition up, but I succumbed on the strength of the computer section alone.
Even though I've doing many of the tricks Nunn mentions when using Chessbase and Fritz products, there were many revelations here. In particular, I want to get back on track and be more religious in using the Repertoire Database feature in Chessbase.
For people like me that historically have had a weakness to repertoire opening books, Chessbase is a great solution. The weakness of opening books is that it is unlikely that you will like, or even be comfortable with, all of the author's suggested lines, which means that you will be left plugging the holes yourself. I think a better approach to the openings is to ask yourself at each juncture: "What move do I personally like best in this position?". You can then check that move against a large database of games and with a chess engine, and if you still like the move, presto: your own repertoire move. I'm going to experiment with coming up with repertoires for a few of my openings by playing by general opening principles, and checking the lines I like as Nunn describes.
I think one advantage of this approach is that, if you're like me and don't have the greatest memory, you'll be playing moves that you like and arrived at yourself. I always tell my students that if they take the extra effort to understand a topic, it reduces the need to rely on memorization. For example, in the French advance Watson recommends the move ...Nh6 in some lines. I know it's the repertoire move, I understand roughly the point to it, and it still makes me uncomfortable. I can either spend extra time to convince myself how great that move is, or I can make my own repertoire and play a more "natural" move of my own choosing.
Another new section of the book deals with chess literature. I was amused to see that he uses both Silman and de la Maza as examples of flaws to watch out for. Nunn likes How to Reassess Your Chess but thinks that some of Silman's examples don't quite match the general principles they're supposed to demonstrate.
Silman's book is quite well-known and can be recommended as a good general guide for club players. My only real concern is that Silman's treatment is strongly tilted towards the 'covering up messy details' end of the spectrum, which can be deceptive since real-life games very rarely follow the smooth progression Silman describes.He then goes through the example J. Sipaila--J.Silman, Reno 1993. He says that Silman's evaluation is correct but doesn't agree with the lines Silman gives to demonstrate that assessment.
There is a limited amount of truth in de la Maza's ideas. Tactics are certainly extremely important in chess, and are probably more so at the under-1800 level.but then proceeds to essentially tear de la Maza a new one. It's tempting to quote, but I'll just direct the curious to their local book store.
