Which are the most entertaining programs to date?

[Ponti]

If you use (???) Win98 get a copy of Power Chess and you will love it.

Well, frankly speaking, you are talking about chess interfaces: yes, they are crap. Best of all is Fritz? I don`t think so, I like Chess Partner and Chess Genius too. I used to train against old REBEL DOS and I must admit it, I miss it, it was a nice program.

Power Chess has a unique feature: spoken comentaries from a soft female voice... wonderful! Unfortunately, it doesn`t run under 2000, XP or - I guess - Vista.

Majestic Chess comes with the same engine, new version. Great graphics. At US$10 or less I`d give it a try...

What you`re asking is of course an old desire of many chess fans. It doesn`t seem to me that CM is the best offer when it comes to interface and features, but it is a good one. I own CM 9000 and use it very often, I like it to play Blitz.

What do you seek in an engine? Most of them are quite strong, and with modern hardware there are few players who can beat them - and amongst amateurs almost none. So it doesn`t matter if it`s Fritz or Tiger or Hiarcs or The King or ...

If you want to study chess then there are many programs that can help you. Get Chess Mentor or CT-ART for example, all great software and not very expensive. Get ChessBase or Chess Assistant for a database, get Chess Academy for an encyclopaedic theory. There are so many choices... it`s hard to choose.

Convekta`s and Chessbase`s softwares are all good in my opinion, it depends on _what_ do you want to train.

Wanna get fun? Choose a tactics software from CA or CB and make all the exercises. You`ll learn chess as you never did.

Play slow chess OTB or over the Internet.
Get also some free software - like Arena, Winboard - I have them all, all of them are great.

A. Ponti

[ozziejoe]

For fun: I would say cm 11 ( assuming they will patch a few of the bugs, otherwise maybe cm10). It is probably the only program you will actually play against. it has a large number of personalities that vary across the entire rating spectrum and have different styles.

For analysis. I would recommend getting Fritz 11 or chess assistant gui and then rybka for analysis.

I think that is all you need. I still use the fritz gui to analyze my games (with rybka), because it is simple and relatively bug free. Chess assistant 11 also has a good analyis feature and and is a great chess database program.


So your cheapest option is probably cm11, chess assistant, and rybka. Anything else can be done with the free arena


best
J

[Ovyron]

I used to train against old REBEL DOS and I must admit it, I miss it, it was a nice program.

It just got stronger and is now called "Pro Deo". To me, Pro Deo has the most human like playing style, because there are positions in where most other engines suggest a "computer" move, that is, a move that seems like no human would play, and it looks artificial. On the other hand, Pro Deo will suggest a move that has a more natural feeling, and that is just as good; it's as if Ed Schröder took some extra steps to discouraging such computer moves.

I recommend Pro Deo (that is free) to those that already own the Chess Partner interface, as it's its "house" and allows you to run it as Winboard engine and to change its parameters on the fly. Version 1.5, unless you are willing to spend time to feed 1.6 BETA some hundreds of games so it gets better than 1.5.

[S.Taylor]

For fun: I would say cm 11 ( assuming they will patch a few of the bugs, otherwise maybe cm10). It is probably the only program you will actually play against. it has a large number of personalities that vary across the entire rating spectrum and have different styles.

For analysis. I would recommend getting Fritz 11 or chess assistant gui and then rybka for analysis.

I think that is all you need. I still use the fritz gui to analyze my games (with rybka), because it is simple and relatively bug free. Chess assistant 11 also has a good analyis feature and and is a great chess database program.


So your cheapest option is probably cm11, chess assistant, and rybka. Anything else can be done with the free arena


best
J

Thank you for distilling things down to all I may want/need, all-round.

So you wouldn't even see I would then need latest Fritz, Hiarcs or so? It's all included in your "prescription"?

I MIGHT even follow that in not too distant future, but I'm still interested in other answers and experiences.

I also thank Mr. Ponti and Ulysses for your ideas.

[Ponti]

Yes, I know Prodeo, in fact I own *all* incarnations of Prodeo from the first version to the last 1.6.
What I was talking about was Rebel`s old DOS interface. In its simplicity it was everything that I needed to train.

I insist that all top engines are strong enough to make good analysis of our games. A friend of mine that is International Master recently told me that he was bored about analysing openings with Rybka because "every position seems to be equal to Rybka"... that means, Rybka`s score to evaluate the position does not change substancially (+0.02 , -0.03...). He said he liked Fritz and Junior because they tend to be more tactical while Rybka is a slow killer...

I once analysed with many different engines some very complicated opening positions and it was incredible to see that there were moves that Junior "saw" that Fritz could only analyse more than 24 hours later... In some positions of middlegame Shredder could make a stupid pawn push that even a class B player would doubt to do. Shredder and Hiarcs are *extremely* strong in the endings and in Blitz time controls. Prodeo (and I think Genius too) is just what we can call "human-style" players. CS-Tal is what I would call an "insanely strong insane player" when playing against humans. Yes, it doesn`t make the strongest moves, but it does make the game more interesting. Chess Tiger Gambit style is such a strong player too - if you use a good "gambit" book with it, it is * much* more funny to play against than Rybka.

For some reason I think Chess Interfaces are not developing with the same consistency as are chess engines. In a good interface I wanted to:

1) What if I could imput my moves using my voice? I`d say "d4" and the program plays it on the board.
The computer could reply in voide too, but differently that they do now - i.e.: Knight ....."e"..... 4..... oh, come on, that`s too slow!! No human talks like that!

2) Spoken commentaries. I mean, *good* ones. There should be spoken commentaries during the game too (not only popping up a window and write "you shouldn`t do that").

3) Real *RESPONSIVE* 3D boards. Try to play a Blitz game in Fritz interface and you`ll understand what I mean (the same problem in CM).
That`s why I dream of buying a DGT board. Playing 2D all the time and going to a tournament with the real board are not the same thing. Your brain is used to see the board in 3D, so you have to train it in 3D!

[Ovyron]

A friend of mine that is International Master recently told me that he was bored about analysing openings with Rybka because "every position seems to be equal to Rybka"... that means, Rybka`s score to evaluate the position does not change substancially (+0.02 , -0.03...). He said he liked Fritz and Junior because they tend to be more tactical while Rybka is a slow killer...

Rybka was just not designed to analyzing openings. As for the best engines for opening analysis, TurboJuice suggested Ktulu 8.0 and Loop 10.32, and I have to agree with him.

3) Real *RESPONSIVE* 3D boards. Try to play a Blitz game in Fritz interface and you`ll understand what I mean (the same problem in CM).

Many approaches has been taken into the representations of 3D chess boards, and none of them had worked. Remember that you are trying to represent 3D on a 2D screen, so it's like a cube, you cannot represent the cube, and what you do is to put some rotated and inclined rectangles, and shade them with different colors, to attain a 3D illusion.

On a 3D chessboard, far away pieces are represented smaller and close pieces look bigger. They look great, but pieces have to block each other and then you end picking the wrong one. The best solution has been 2D representation, and unless you have a better idea about how a 3D chessboard should work, then maybe a 3D representation that works is just impossible.