What GUI you use and why?

[bastiball]

There are different GUI's for tournaments and analysis, what do you prefer to use and why?

• Banskia

• Cutechess

• Arena

• Fritz/Chessbase

• Hiarcs

• Shredder

• Others

[hgm]

I use WinBoard / XBoard. Why? Because it is fast and reliable, extremely powerful in terms of the features it offers, and has good support for chess variants. And it is open source, so if I need anything that it cannot do, I can simply add that feature.

I also like that it has a 'flexible appearance', where you can close the windows with data you are not interested in, and which makes it easy to lay out a large number of instances on the screen.

[swami]

Chessbase for reviewing games and analysis
Arena for Engine tournaments
Banksia GUI for Human vs Engine matches
Chess Hero for solving puzzles - A gem of a find, IMO.

[Gabor Szots]

I use chess GUI's exclusively for engine tournaments. Therefore, Arena is my first choice by a mile. The only reason I use other GUI's as well is that I have not found suitable icons for more than two Arena instances...
Yes, I have many time forfeits under Arena and many losses owing to alleged illegal moves. Still, its advantages are so overwhelming that I rather live with those flaws than use something else.

I also use Fritz and Shredder but only for UCI engines. Fritz is more modern but cannot use java engines. Shredder can but its interface is so outdated, in fact primitive. Neither of them is user-friendly from a tester's point of view.

I would like to use Cute Chess but its inability to stop then resume tournaments makes it practically useless for me.

[Magnum]

To answer the question:
98% of the people which are using a GUI are unable to change to another GUI.

[hgm]

I use chess GUI's exclusively for engine tournaments. Therefore, Arena is my first choice by a mile. The only reason I use other GUI's as well is that I have not found suitable icons for more than two Arena instances...
Yes, I have many time forfeits under Arena and many losses owing to alleged illegal moves. Still, its advantages are so overwhelming that I rather live with those flaws than use something else.

Have you ever tried WinBoard, and if so, what were the shortcomings you percieved w.r.t. Arena? Especially for tournaments I would have thought that WinBoard supports all options one could ever wish.

[AdminX]

I feel like I use them all, as I just have a love for chess in general. I use Chessbase and Hiarcs Chess Explorer Pro for game replays ( Live and Post Games). Shredder, Banksia, and Cutechess for Engine vs. Engine (I used to use Arena). For online play (Human vs. Human) I use LiChess (There was a time when I used Winboard and Jin on FICS.) At the end of the day I use whatever tool I need to get the job done. Hell I still use Chess Planet from time to time. I don't restrict my self to just one platform so I guess I have no choice or maybe just to many. I will use Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, MacOS or whatever else is around the corner. Chess is my drug of choice, everything else is just a tool for me to get to it.

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi there,

I gave my vote for:

Shredder GUI
- can use the GUI for tournaments on different systems.
- high stability.

But most interesting for me ...

Cutechess
- all is very nice and easy. Well designed.

and to the others ...

Arena
- to many own ideas inside, old love ... since I gave up my helps around the project 1time installed.
All project goals were achieved for more as 15 years.

Winboard:
Yes, for more as 20 years ... my favorite GUI.
On my list to looking more in detail what HGM do here.

Banksia:
- on my ToDo list ... if I have more time for it.

Hiarcs Chess Explorer:
A great piece of software.
No ... a fantastic software!!

So many love to the detail ... important things works fine.
My compliment!

Difficult to give a vote:
For the moment Shredder but after my still running tournament I have other things in my brain to do.
The first what I do is ... looking more in the details from all the nice available GUIs.

Great works also are: Nibbler, LiGround or LucasChess (LucasChess on my ToDo list for looking more in detail).
For two weeks I do different things with LiGround.



The community have not a GUI problem, the community have a statistic problem.

Tools are very important!!
The work from Ferdinand, Davis, Norm ... geniusses are working.

I like that other persons do here a bit.
The new tool from Stefan Pohl for an example.

After all ...
We have a problem around statistics, not around GUIs.
With all the available tools and GUIs a lot is possible, but more nice is a GUI for statistics.
Here I missed a development!

Best
Frank

[Gabor Szots]

I use chess GUI's exclusively for engine tournaments. Therefore, Arena is my first choice by a mile. The only reason I use other GUI's as well is that I have not found suitable icons for more than two Arena instances...
Yes, I have many time forfeits under Arena and many losses owing to alleged illegal moves. Still, its advantages are so overwhelming that I rather live with those flaws than use something else.

Have you ever tried WinBoard, and if so, what were the shortcomings you percieved w.r.t. Arena? Especially for tournaments I would have thought that WinBoard supports all options one could ever wish.

Yes. In fact in the beginnings I used WinBoard exclusively. You might remember my tournament series 'SzG Swiss' which even had an own web page (that was before I became a CCRL tester, more than 16 years ago). That was played under WinBoard.
Then came Arena. In spite of it being much more user friendly I continued using WinBoard as well. Until a catastrophe happened. I wanted to reinstall my WinBoard installation. I used the WinBoard installer for that. During the process all of my installed engines (the engine directories) got deleted. That was due to an oversight by me, true, but it was too much of a shock and I decided never to use WinBoard again. I don't remember the details but you and I were in correspondence at the time, it was in 2016.

[hgm]

OK, I remember that disaster. And took measures in the uninstaller script so that this could never happen again, always leaving the root directory of the install when there was unexpected other stuff in it. But I fully understand your decision to be careful.

But this cannot be blamed on the quality of WinBoard's tournament manager.