Author: George Sobala
Date: 14:05:15 11/13/02
Just received CA7 today and it is an awesome program. (I've ended up buying CT15 twice this way as I already had the ChessPartner version, but that is not what the purchase was about.) The GUI is very complex (NOT for beginners!) but if you have worked your way through the ChessBase / ChessMaster / ChessPartner offerings and want something better to help you analyse and understand your chess, then this is the way forward. It seems to fill in all the deficiencies of the other interfaces. And I haven't even begun to tap its power. Most impressive is the sophisticated way in which the GUI controls the chess engines to analyse a game - automatic multiphase passes though the game to refine the analysis in various ways. Yet one option of controlling this power is to simply set a time limit for the analysis (e.g. "6-15 minutes") and suitable settings are chosen for you. When you come to review the results the main annotations are obviously in the game text, but you also get to see the history of the engines thinking and alternative variations at each move in other windows as you flip through the game. (NB I mean "history" here - quite different from having to wait for live engine analysis to unfold.) You can set up the engine to analyze in the background, you can simultaneously analyse with multiple engines, and you can even set up a client-server relationship using multiple computers on a network so that a second engine can give you live "remote" analysis whilst the first runs on your PC. The ICC interface is smoothly integrated into all this. The database is huge and they offer free monthly online updates. Worst and best of all, the program resolutely refused to run on my laptop running XP. (Worked fine on W98 and NT). I sent an e-mail to support at about 1pm UK time, after an exchange of 4-5 e-mails with debugging information with Nikita in Russia I had a fresh live patch working by 8pm UK time - that's about 11pm in Russia I believe. Now THAT is support!
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