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Subject: Re: Fritz Endgame Turbo -- My Opinion

Author: Brian Katz

Date: 20:40:18 03/01/03

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On March 01, 2003 at 19:50:05, Mike Hood wrote:

>On March 01, 2003 at 19:30:05, Brian Katz wrote:
>
>>On March 01, 2003 at 08:32:27, Mike Hood wrote:
>>
>>>The Nalimov endgame tablebases can be downloaded for free from Bob's ftp site,
>>>but I suppose it's nice to be able to buy them from Chessbase if you're without
>>>the Internet or have a slow connection. However, I don't see the point in
>>>offering a selection of the "most important" 5-piece tablebases. I think that
>>>the collection should be sold complete or not at all. After all, the most
>>>important endgame to me is usually the one that cropped up in my last club
>>>match, and Chessbase has no way of knowing that.
>>>
>>>Just my opinion.....
>>
>>I purchased the 9 Disk set of Nalimov Tablebases from this very site.
>>There are a few 5 piece endgames missing. The missing 5 piece endgames are
>>ridiculous endgames like KQRN vs K   KQQQ vs K and some other endgames with King
>>and 3 pieces vs a King  or KRPP vs K.
>
>Well, yes... most Kxxx vs K endgames are useless by themselves, since chess
>programs would have no trouble finding a win by calculation once these positions
>arise. However, I find tablebases like KQRN-K valuable to speed up the search
>during probing. If a search branch is found with only these five pieces on the
>board the engine can return the "Mate in N" value from the tablebase and then
>spend time examining other branches instead of wasting time going deeper into
>this branch.

I suspected that would be the case and that is why I ended up generating the
missing 26 endgames. I have plenty of space on my harddrive. My Tablebase folder
is over 7 gig. I have an 80 gig harddrive and I still have well over 50 gig of
empty space. It will be a long time if ever at all, before I use up most of the
empty space. Plus this computer is used primarily for chess anyway, so why not
just enjoy it. It is a great learning tool. It is kind of fun to have all of the
Tablebase endgames.

Brian Katz



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