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Subject: Re: Best Analysis Engine?

Author: Bob Durrett

Date: 08:14:58 11/20/02

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On November 20, 2002 at 06:52:52, Stuart Smith wrote:

>I have just started to play chess and receently bought ChessMaster 9000 which I
>think is an excellent all round package but I'm not too sure if its analysis
>mode is particularily good. Any comments?
>
>I play against a friend at work during my lunch break and usually lose;
>sometimes I seem to be in a winning position and then I end up losing so I would
>like to be able to analyse the games to see where I went wrong.

That's a supurb idea.  I wish I had done that when playing lunchtime chess at
work.  My opponent, a USCF Expert, trounced me mercilessly 49 out of 50 games
and really enjoyed making me sweat.  Everybody knew when he won, because he made
lots of noise about it.  Sadly, there were no PCs back then.  But there were
opening books, in hardcopy format.  I never looked at them to find improvements.
 Dumb, dumb, dumb.

>At this point I
>can't really say if I prefer positional or tactical play except to say that I
>try to play positionally and fail, and usually fail to spot the opportunity for
>good tactical play.

Could you indicate your approximate playing strength in those games?  It would
make a difference.  Are you and your opponents all GMs?  Or what?

>
>What would you advise for such a job (I don't necessarily want the strongest
>playing engine but the 'best' analysis engine, but maybe the two are are
>inseparable).

If you are an amateur like me, then almost any analysis engine would do just
fine for looking at your middlegames.  [I use Fritz 7, and will upgrade to Fritz
8 soon.] If you are a strong player, then you may wish to acquire and install an
endgame tablebase too.

A chess engine with a good opening book would be helpful for openings.  The
opening book would make suggestions for other lines to try.  You could
experiment with different ideas from the book or go out on a limb and try your
own opening ideas.  Personally, I favor the latter.  If you try your own opening
ideas, the opening book can still help you to identify your opening mistakes.

If you and your friends are at the Expert or Master level, you will wish to
obtain Chessbase version 8.0 or Chess Assistant 7.0 to look at a large
collection of high-quality master games.

I assume you are using the single-processor machine you describe below at home
to do your analysis.  If you also intended also doing the analysis at work on a
multi-processor machine, you would need to identify and describe your computer
and the language here and get someone like Bob Hyatt, or his sparring partner
Vincent D., to advise you.

>
>I am running a P4 2.2GHz with 1Gb RDRAM so processing power shouldn't be too
>much of a problem.

Windows?  The operating system makes a difference.

>
>
>Thanks



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