making an opening book

[poisonedpawn]

i want to learn how to make my own opening books. but i have absolutely no idea where to start. what would be a good place to start and are there any decent texts that would be simple enough to for a complete beginner to understand. thanks.

[Robert Flesher]

i want to learn how to make my own opening books. but i have absolutely no idea where to start. what would be a good place to start and are there any decent texts that would be simple enough to for a complete beginner to understand. thanks.

Trying searching chessbase, they had an article some time ago that was quite good. Good luck!

Try starting here :

http://www.chessbase.com/support/support.asp?pid=33

[tano-urayoan]

Which format are you interested? Chessbase, Arena, polyglot?

[poisonedpawn]

well mostly chessbase format. i use arena now and then but mostly chessbase. why does the process differ?

[tano-urayoan]

Well assigning weights and % of play I suppose I am not familiar with Arena sorry. For chessbase there are blogs and sites that state the basics for example Kevin Frayer(google it), there is a thread in the Rybka Forum where this was discussed ad nauseum.

[Hugo]

Hello John

for making an opening book for ChessBase GUI are many ways possible. Two of them are:
1) you can work with existing .ctg book and improve them.
good books are for example hiarcs ctg (costs a little money, but is worth for)
or books from http://www.gladiators-chess.ru/downloads.php?cat_id=2
2) you can make a new book, and import high-quality games to get a basics to start from. games can be found http://www.gladiators-chess.ru/downloads.php?cat_id=1
but you should know, that a book is never ready. It is more a project which needs constant work. Chess theory is always in movement.

regards, Clemens

[Mark Mason]

Hi daren john,

I created this guide a while ago to explain from basics how to make a .ctg openings book:

1. Start with a database of games that you want to use to make your book.

2. Create a new book in Fritz by selecting FILE/NEW/OPENINGS BOOK - call it anything you like.

3. Open your new book by selecting FILE/OPEN/OPENINGS BOOK and selecting the new book you created earlier.

4. Now import the games from your database by selecting EDIT/OPENINGS BOOK/IMPORT GAMES and navigating to your database.

5. There is a dialogue box which you need to tick against. "Games" is the number of games you want to import. Default is all games are selected so leave this. "Length" is how deep the lines will be in the book. Choosing "ECO-relative" plus a number will make the main line variations longer than the oddball side variations. If you pick "Absolute length" and a number, it will make all the variations the length you chose, regardless of whether the variation is a main line or side line - so book will be deeper. "Include variations" is important if some of the games from your database contain commentary in the form of sub-variations, but can be left un-ticked.

6. When you're finished with these settings, click "OK". You'll see a progress bar appear, keeping you posted as to how close Fritz has come to completing the, you'll see a menu of moves where the empty book had been and a small window saying "x new positions" (this tells you how many positions total are in the new tree). Click OK, and you're finished.

Now you have made the book you need to tune it to strengthen it. One simple way to tune your book is to open Fritz and play back over your drawn or lost games. Open a game and make sure the relevant opening book (that you are trying to tune) is also loaded. Now play through the game, looking at the book tab at the same time, to the point at which you leave the book phase (ie. no more book moves). If the evaluation was equal or negative for you at that point, then run Rybka in infinite analysis in that position (say to depth 18 or 19) and whatever it suggests as the strongest move you put this move into your book so that next time you play that line, the engine will choose the stronger move. This is time consuming but it is the way to make your book play stronger moves than other people's books.

In terms of how to manually edit the moves in the book :

Go into Fritz and do File/Open/Openings Book and select the book you want to edit. Then select the Openings Book tab on right hand side of screen. Basically you can either

a) add a new move to the book, To do this right click somewhere in that book area (not on a move just in empty space) and tick Allow Move Adding. then when you play back through a game and want to add the new line tou have just analysed, just make the move on the actual board and then select new main line from the options. This will then have added the move to the book permanently.

b) change the 'weighting' of an existing move making it more/less likely to be chosen. This is shown in the Prob / % column. To change it right click on the actual move itself and do change weight. The value is from -125 (very unlikely to be picked) to +125 (very likely to be picked). You can change these manually to any value. Actually this is what the automatic book learning does based on whether games are won or lost - but this is how you do it manually.

c) or mark moves either red (means they won't be played ever) or green (mean they will be picked, with a probablility given by the % column). To make a move red right click on it and select Don't play in tournament
To make a move green right click on it and select Main Move. You might want to make a move red if you find that at some point in the book line you had a negative evaluation and therefore you can mark that move red so it won't be played again.

There is more to it than this but this should give you enough to start editing your book which is a great start and you should see an improvement in results once you've started to tune the book like this. If you do this after every few games it doesn't take too long but will greatly improve the book.

Hope this helps - good luck.

[poisonedpawn]

thanks all for yr advice.

[poisonedpawn]

and im guessing u r mr V mark : )...am i right?