Author: Lawrence S. Tamarkin
Date: 00:44:56 09/15/02
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Here's what I posted on the Chess Cafe: 433-3 I highly recommend the latest version of ChessMaster - It combines almost every imaginable feature one could want in a playing program, and includes many tutorials, some of which are written by a ChessCafe columnist! It has at least 150 different historic and custom made 'personalities', some of which are children players and beginners. Some of the key features of this program are listed on the chessmaster page, www.chessmaster.com. The Ubi Soft company provides good customer support for this product, and is quite responsive to user feedback, for new features in the next versions. I've never been disappointed in a ChessMaster program, which is updated about once a year. The program is advanced enough for masters, yet comprehensive enough for complete beginners and children. Also, the price is quite nice for such a complete program. Larry S. Tamarkin [9-7-02] Since posting this comment, I have used some of the Waitzkin tutorials, and tried the Rate your chess feature, as well as a few of Larry Evens and John Nunn problems. The program is very rich in all these different tutorials, and is very challenging for me as a USCF Life Master with a FIDE rating of 2184. I found it significantly better organized then previous versions of the same program. I do reccomend the following improvements for the next version though; 1: Make the 2d boards resizable using the drag & drop via the right mouse key. (In fact, please make all windows resizable via draging). 2: Make scrolling through the moves in a game possible with the right arrow key in any envirement, including the tutorials (Use a switch to activiate it, if this is an envirement where your normally not suppossed to do this - choosing to scrol through moves here, being equivelent to ending the test). 3. Make all the moves of the Josh Waitkin games replayable via the right mouse key, even though Josh only analysis some of his games at the critical moment. I really hate having to search the database seperately to see all the moves of these games, & I'm not sure that they are always included in this database either. Also, sometimes Josh refers to his opponent or himself playing a game in this or that same line in an event - I'd really love it, if he would include this game in the database, or better still, in a seperate 'Josh Waitkins selected games' database - A possible new database for a future version! The above being said, I really think that Josh Waitzkin has found a beautiful, instructive & unique ninch as a chess commentater with these Chess Master products - I've enjoyed his lectures more then any others, and I hope he continues doing this for a long time to come! Larry T. On September 15, 2002 at 02:08:23, Jason Williamson wrote: >Since John is an active poster here, I felt I should make the comment that I >found CM9000 to be an excellent product. I haven't had time to run any tests >between various engines as yet, but it sure has beat the pants of me so far. :) > >I like the 3d boards, but of course I still find them impracticle to play with, >they just don't quite project well enough. But perhaps its just a question of >getting used to them. Also, I haven't had time to fully explore the various >features yet, but agian, it looks nice and plays a decent game. ;) > >JW
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