Author: Adrian MacNair
Date: 15:30:06 01/20/99
I just received in the mail this morning my purchase of Junior 5.0 based on
the Fritz 5 engine and interface. Naturally I was very, very excited. I have
been using Chessmaster 5000 as my game of choice until now, since it is very
strong and it has has a good interface for a part time user. Perhaps some chess
background is necessary. I am a decent player of 1900-2100 skill who plays
correspondence games via email and also sometimes real time on various websites.
Naturally chessmaster 5000 helped my game a lot, although I found it's endgame
to be weak, and lack of analysis and PGN reading to be annoying.
So I bought the Junior 5.0 engine believing it to be strong enough to both
teach me and give me a good whooping in the meantime. Well, I must have done
something wrong, because naturally I wanted to see how it played out of the box.
Game 1 was against my old CM5000 and I watched them go at it. CM won in about 26
moves with a checkmate. I then asked Junior to play again a rated game with
maximum strength. Even giving CM5000 a think time of 1 second, and Junior a time
of 10 seconds, Junior was destroyed! I tried it next against the freeware GNU
Chess just to see if my worst nightmare was true. GNU chess (a free program off
the internet) beat Junior in the 89th move. I then played it myself, on the
strongest setting, and it made a fatal error in the 26th move by refusing to
capture my knight and it was checkmate.
PLEASE, someone tell me what I am doing wrong. Do I have to purchase chess
move databases? What do I need? I thought it was a stand alone program. I want
to learn from the best, and the way to do that is to lose to the best. I did my
research and Junior was the Microcomp chess champ, and this year is third
apparently. What am I doing wrong? I am eager to play against a program that
holds the most challenge for me, not one that goes soft.
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