Author: Albert Silver
Date: 20:58:38 01/02/04
Go up one level in this thread
On January 02, 2004 at 18:51:16, Robin Smith wrote:
>On January 02, 2004 at 18:25:29, Albert Silver wrote:
>
>>
>>>could make an equally strong case for Chessbase. There _is_ a reason most GM's
>>>use Chessbase.
>>
>>Yes, Chessbase got a Windows version in first, and despite being technically
>>inferior or equal at best in every single aspect to Chess Assistant, it is tough
>>getting people to relearn a newer system. That's why they continue to use it.
>>This has been the universal reason, not a single exception, given by the players
>>themselves when shown what Chess Assistant had to offer. They also like the
>>looks of Chessbase. However, if you are looking to study, prepare or improve
>>your game, CA is where it's at. Actually, to be fair, Chessbase has a wonderful
>>database, the latest offering of Mega2004 for example (though I only have
>>Mega2003, which I bought and use in CA).
>>
>>Try having Chessbase analyze a game. Try having Fritz turn on the engine and see
>>what it thinks of a move.
>>
>> Albert
>>
>>>But I digress. I think we can agree, as you stated above, that
>>>for the casual user a $50 program like Fritz is good enough.
>>>
>>>Robin
>
>Albert,
>
>I have both Chessbase and Chess Assistant (7.1). I personally, for what I do,
>prefer Chessbase. And not because of "the universal reason" you site above.
>While it is not the _only_ limitation of Chess Assitant, the _biggest_ is the
>lack of strong engine support, only Tiger and Shredder. Both of these programs
>do not handle interative analysis as well as Hiarcs, Fritz or Junior, all three
>of which do a better job retaining hash table info when working interactively.
I don't agree. In fact, CA 7.1 has a specific interactive analysis function, as
opposed to forcing you to simply go back and forth in a line as one would do in
CB, as well as normal background analysis in CA. Naturally, the Fritz GUI
doesn't have any interactive analysis. As to strength, the last I looked
Shredder 7.04 was still king of the hill, and it is very nicely supported by CA.
I use it and Chess Tiger 15 for my analytical purposes, and await Shredder 8 and
Ruffian 2.0 to see how they fare.
>Shredder and Tiger also have some evaluation quirks.
Presumably, these quirks are unique to them as opposed to the engines you
mentioned. Could you be more specific?
And try running an engine
>tournament from within Chess Assistant. These limitations of Chess Assistant are
>all severe for top level analysis.
I have never heard a single master or grandmaster refer to or use an engine
tournament in either of the programs, nor can I see how this would affect their
top-level analysis.
>Of course Chessbase has limitations too. CA
>trees are much better than CB. Database searches are faster and CA has some
>search features not in CB.
Actually, CA has a LOT more to it than that over CB with all due respect. The
tree work one can do in CA knows no competition and it is the single-most
powerful means of studying openings. We're not just talking about having instant
stats. We're talking about having access to several trees simultaneously, the
inclusion of one's own moves, evaluations, and written analysis, all within the
tree, and use of the engines within the tree. And of course, when we say tree,
we mean the entire *position* tree for the whole 2 million plus games, built
within a couple of hours (on my slow 1 GHz machine), and taking up 1.5 GB more
or less. Try getting Chessbase to do this. Report the results within a couple of
days after it finishes.
It carries far more analytical functions for complete game analysis, with
control to the Nth degree. It has the most powerful repertoire building tools
available as well, but frankly, to go into much detail would start to be
construed as spam here I think. Suffice it to say that one need NEVER build 2
dozen little databases to organize one's openings. One can build an infinite
number of subbases within the same base, without ever repeating any games (no
duplicates) and assign texts, multimedia and autoatic updating for each
subsection. This without taking up any real extra space of course.
It also has the most powerful (gets tiresome using the word, but true is true)
book building tools for the engine freaks who enjoy building and tweaking
opening books for their engine. Still, this won't include Fritz, it's quite
true. You enjoy adding colored arrows, squares and other visual markers on the
board? It goes without saying that CA has 10 times more than CB's offerings. In
fact, CB must have been very impressed with the annotation palette used in CA
since CA3, since as of CB8 they changed and copied CA's.
Of course, just to force users to buy both, Fritz users who don't have CB,
cannot enter their own games into it, and if they run analysis of a game, they
cannot ask the engine to show them what it thinks of a specific move. Ever. One
can certainly buy both and have the joy of flipping back and forth between the
programs, not to mention pay $165 for Chessbase 8, which comes with Fritz 5 BTW,
considerably weaker than Chess Tiger 15 and 14 IMO (both included in CA7), and
then pay an extra $53 for a good engine to use. Or you can pay $109 for Chess
Assistant 7.1
Albert
P.S. the prices cited above are taken from the sites of the manufacturers.
Like I said, I have both. But I use Chessbase and/or
>the Fritz GUI most often.
>
>Robin
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