Nowadays, it is hard to imagine effective chess training, game analysis and sparring without the involvement of a computer opponent. It is the possibility of using modern tools that makes a simple, even old and slow computer sufficient – to take advantage of the benefits of computer support. For training, analysis or checking errors in games, all you need is dedicated software and one of the proven and recognized only one chess engine playing at least at grandmaster level. Great for such activities are commercial engines such as: Fritz, Hiarcs or TheKing (Chessmaster). Of the free equivalents, Komodo (one of the older versions) or Rodent (versions II or III) engines are worth mentioning, as they are very customizable (parameters, personalities). From commercial, but not expensive alternatives, I suggest you get interested in ChessBase software, released a few years ago and available e.g. on popular auction sites. I mean, e.g. older versions of Fritz, Junior, Shredder - containing engines playing at 2800-3000 Elo - sufficient for the above mentioned chess tasks. But... what to choose when you are a heavy user, and you analyze chess games and positions a lot and very often you are looking for novelties and ideas you play many correspondence games at once you need to catch the smallest inaccuracies, or You play against another very determined and strong opponent who, like you, uses a computer with powerful chess software? In this article, I will try to answer this question subjectively and with a pinch of salt. Let's look at the ranking list of the ten ( 10 ) the strongest chess engines. (The list is current as of the writing of this article) Source: CCRL Oh, in first place is Stockfish. So if I choose Stockfish - the strongest engine in this ranking list, will my analysis, my news and ideas -> finally my results be the best ? No :-) Of course not. And I write this as a correspondence chess player who has been playing for several decades and who has spent dozens of hours on analysis every week. It is a mistake to choose only one engine for such a heavy task, it is a mistake to choose the same engine which is most often chosen by rivals and opponents. This is why in hmm some well-known organizations of correspondence chess players 99% of chess games end in draws in games lasting many months and sometimes even several years. And that's why the best correspondence chess players don't play in those organizations anymore; it's a waste of time and lack of satisfaction from wins after breaking dozens of opponents using the same chess engine. (moving a bit away from the substance, where to play correspondence chess then - we will check out various cool places on the web in the next article). So what to choose? How can an ambitious chess player work at such a high level ? I suggest using not one ( 1 ) but four ( 4 ) chess engines. The first engine. The strongest engine, that will always have an advantage over others is your Brain. Supported by knowledge, developed through further matches and games, developed through chess literature and movies. Add to this year's of experience and the right set of chess software and you get a level of play well above 4000 Elo (in the correspondence game). This is not a joke - in the text below some examples :-) Just to clarify, obviously an ICCF correspondence player ranking of 2500 is not equivalent to a 2500 Elo ranking of the FIDE federation. Games played by correspondence are 1000-2000 "standard" Elo points higher than ordinary games played e.g. in FIDE at rapid or tournament pace. Knowledge of chess, thanks to the work of chess players and new technologies such as chess engines, is moving forward, not standing still. It is worth deepening your knowledge and gaining experience, if only by playing regularly online with people or computer opponents. Second and third engines. They are "computer" friends. It is worth getting to know them well, it is worth getting to know their style of play, understanding how a possible change of parameters will affect their game and understanding the positions in which these engines achieve the best results. The style of play of these two engines is very important to me, because I always choose two engines that play in a similar style to mine. If, for example, I like to play closed positions full of many strategic possibilities, then I want the two engines to aim for that kind of position as well. The second engine I use is Komodo Dragon. The third engine I use is Berserk. I use both of these engines mainly in the early and mid game. The third engine I use is Stockfish. I use Stockfish for end game position analysis and for quick tactical analysis and checking/finding errors and inaccuracies. Why I chose these engines - I will show you some examples. All of the following positions were chess engine tested on a MacBook Pro with an Apple M1 processor (7 threads) using the Hiarcs Chess Explorer GUI. First, a chess position from the famous 1998 game between Topalov Vesselin and Shirov Alexei. Shirov played a brilliant 47...Bh3 !! (from a human point of view). For years chess engines were unable to find this move, or arrived at it after a very long time of "thinking" A modern engine finds Bishop's move to the h3 field in... seconds. Stockfish managed within 4 seconds and... Fen: 8/8/4kpp1/3p1b2/p6P/2B5/6P1/6K1 b - - 0 47 ...Komodo Dragon found the best move in just 1 second ! Fen: 8/8/4kpp1/3p1b2/p6P/2B5/6P1/6K1 b - - 0 47 So much for difficult test items for engines ;-) There are many such well-known test positions from various tests that once seemed "unsolvable" for engines, and today modern engines take a few seconds at most. But what wonderful progress has been made in the domain of chess engines, hasn't it ? The next entry is from a correspondence game played with white by the author of this article in 2014. At the time, neither engine "saw" a winning line for white based on white's King maneuver from the g1 field to the e1 field. Today, in March 2022, some engines see white's positional advantage but only a few engines are able to give a winning maneuver within minutes - Berserk is one such engine (44 seconds). Fen: r6k/4qp1n/3r1np1/p1pPp1B1/PpP1P2P/1P3R2/5RQ1/3B2K1 w - - 0 49 An position from another correspondence game of mine. It takes a good computer and a strong chess engine to find a winning move 25.Rxg5+ in a reasonable time. Komodo Dragon finds the right move in 18 seconds using the MTCS algorithm. Fen: 5rk1/8/pqPp1r1p/1p1Pp1bR/4B3/5PP1/PP2Q1K1/R7 w - - 0 25 Below is an chess position invented by Mr. Lyudmil Tsetkov. Very difficult to solve by contemporary modern engines. The Berserk engine, which has a wonderful ability to "look beyond the horizon" found a winning and impressive move and continuation lines almost immediately ! Fen: 1r3r2/4bpkp/1qb1p1p1/3pP1P1/p1pP1Q2/PpP2N1R/1Pn1B2P/3RB2K w - - 0 1 Another very difficult position for chess engines but relatively easy for the human chess player. And in this case the Berserk engine gives the right move after a while. Fen: 4n3/4k3/p4n2/Pp1p1p1p/QPpPpPpP/2P1P1P1/1R3BK1/7R w - - 0 1 The next position comes from a set called Nolot, which is difficult for engines to solve. For the Stockfish chess engine, finding the correct tactical hit is not a problem. After 4 seconds we get the correct solution. Fen: r3rbk1/ppq2ppp/2b1pB2/8/6Q1/1P1B3P/P1P2PP1/R2R2K1 w - - 0 1 Below is a demonstration of the incredible tactical power of the Stockfish engine - only 15 seconds and a correct e5 indication. Fen: r2qrb1k/1p1b2p1/p2ppn1p/8/3NP3/1BN5/PPP3QP/1K3RR1 w - - 0 1 And another position from my correspondence chess game played in 2002. Indisputably 46.Qh3 leads to a draw. The Komodo Dragon engine using the MCTS algorithm finds a draw move within 4 seconds. Fen: 6k1/3q2b1/8/7Q/2n5/P7/3p1PP1/3R2K1 w - - 0 46 Below is a very complicated position. Komodo Dragon once again finds the strongest move in a short period of time. Fen: r2q3r/1p1bbQ2/4p1Bk/3pP3/1n1P1P1p/pP6/Pn4PP/R1B1R1K1 w - - 0 1 And the last of the positions where Stockfish can find a spectacular tactical strike in just a few seconds ! Fen: r1qr1bk1/2p2pp1/ppn1p2p/8/1PPPN1nP/P4NP1/2Q2PK1/2BRR3 w - - 0 24 As I wrote earlier, Komodo Dragon is the main analysis engine for me in the early and middle stages of a chess game. This engine plays in a style that suits me, has great chess knowledge implemented by outstanding programmers and Mr. Larry Kaufman, who is the Grandmaster and one of the creators of Komodo Dragon. Extremely useful is the ability to change the parameters of this engine and to choose the MCTS algorithm, which in some positions handles extremely effectively. Berserk, on the other hand, is a free engine that plays at a very high level distinguished by its "human" approach and ability to find amazing moves, ideas and novelties. Stockfish, on the other hand, is an engine - a tactical monster and probably the most versatile in every phase of a chess game - but for me and in the positions I play - not at all the most effective of engines. In my opinion, the key to success in the field of chess I'm describing, besides your own knowledge, is the ability to choose the right tools and use them, e.g. by changing engine parameters. Of course, the more powerful the computer on which the engine runs - the better usually, because we will get to the desired results faster. Although it is worth bearing in mind that a very powerful computer can simply ... can be rented for relatively little money. You do not have to buy expensive components and assemble a computer and pay high electricity bills. There are places on the Internet, such as ChessBase server called PlayChess, where you can use such fast computers and modern engines. Let's remember the most important "engine - our brain." Using even a very fast computer and a modern chess engine does not guarantee success. Stockfish does not see the winning Qf6+, which the Berserk engine found almost instead. Example in content above - modern Stockfish engine running on PlayChess server using 64 CPU's calculating 123 MN chess positions in 1 second. Fen: 1r3r2/4bpkp/1qb1p1p1/3pP1P1/p1pP1Q2/PpP2N1R/1Pn1B2P/3RB2K w - - 0 1 The methods of working with chess engines described in this article are only a guideline, but certainly not the best and universal method that will bring the best results for every chess player. It's a bit like with a suit - the tailor-made one fits and lies best. In other words, I encourage you to experiment with chess engines and customize them to your needs. Always - the best "chess engine" - is the human brain.

Do engines play chess in any style ? And if so, what difference does it make to a human or... another engine ? Does the style of chess play affect the results ? On these and other questions I will lead the deliberations in this article. Chess, like other fields such as painting or music, is recognized as an art. Of course, for many it can be something else: a challenge, a sport, a puzzle, a way to spend free time, etc. However, there is no doubt that just like other arts, chess can also "be painted or played" like painting a picture or arranging a song with a specific style of play. The thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are entirely subjective. Please approach them with a grain of salt :-) Many established chess players are associated with a specific style of play. For example, let's take two World Chess Champions of the time. Tigran Petrosjan – many of his games give us a picture of a chess player who was extremely effective at conducting defense, maintaining positions, and converting gains into victories. Mikhail Tal, on the other hand, very often impressed us with his extremely effective attack sense and spectacular victories after seemingly only one mistake of the opponent. The same is the case for every human chess player and every chess engine (computer). So how do chess engines play. For sure: they make mistakes they used to even lose to humans Source: Rebel play in different styles there are weaker ones and slightly stronger ones some play better on offense than defense, and vice versa the best engines are much stronger than the strongest man. they can play very, very fast etc. And they certainly don't get tired while playing - so chess engines play like... chess engines in their particular style :-) What is this "style of play"? Generally, chess players say: how aggressive a given player is, and or whether he plays a "tactical" style or a slower, more methodical "positional" style. With these terms it's easy to characterize someone's chess game, and they are understandable for both beginners and advanced players. Of course, the playing style of a given chess engine is actually determined by a set of many criteria that are included in the position evaluation function. Sometimes the engine's creator decides to give access to setting its parameters, which sometimes makes it possible to change the engine's playing style by its user (e.g. TheKing engine in Chessmaster program). It is worth mentioning that the more developed the engine's position evaluation function is, the more it increases its playing strength. In other words - the engine is "chess smarter" A great example is one of the most powerful chess engine Komodo, whose one of the creators is Grandmaster Larry Kaufman working among other things on the position evaluation feature implemented in this engine. Nowadays, more and more importance is given to the development of training capabilities of chess engines in conjunction with specialized software and the search for interesting ideas, for example in openings or further middle play. The vast majority of chess players do not need for training a "chess monster" who plays with a strength much higher than any grandmaster and in a style completely misunderstood by humans. Of course, such a monstrosity is useful for relatively fast game analysis or chess games at an -acceptable- level. Instead of waiting 15 minutes for a full analysis, today we can get it after 1, 2 or 3 minutes. Chess engine table arranged by playing style. It is worth mentioning on this occasion about group of enthusiasts who test chess engines, play matches and tournaments between them, and keep ranking lists (author of this article also belongs to this respectable group). If it weren't for the work they do, we wouldn't know how much power each engine plays with. 10-20 years ago, when the strongest engines played at the Masters level or at most at the Grandmaster level and when engines participated in matches and tournaments going up against people, their playing styles were known and their play understood. Using a few such Classics as an example, I will describe their different playing styles. The Hiarcs engine, which in 2021 has already lived to see its 15th release since the first versions over 30 years ago - has been recognized as an engine that plays chess in a very "human" style. But what does "human" style of play mean ? The author of this article, after playing dozens of games with Hiarcs, confirms that Hiarcs plays in a very "natural" way without being overly aggressive or making moves not understandable to humans. Hiarcs in the latest version plays with his maximum strength of about 3200 Elo, but as a coach or sparring partner this enormous playing strength is not overwhelming; Hiarcs can adapt himself with style and level of play. Another chess engine is Fritz which, like Hiarcs, has a great history of several decades and is still being developed by various authors. In its first versions Fritz was a "tactical assassin" who did not hesitate to try to win at all costs (often losing games because of it). Today, after many years of development, when Fritz has reached its 18th edition, the engine has a great deal of tactical knowledge, as well as a lot of knowledge allowing for sophisticated positional play and supporting the training process. Very interesting at one time was and still is the chess engine Junior. Multiple Computer World Champion who tied a match with Garry Kasparov himself. Known for his beautiful and non-standard play, with a very creative style of play that over the years has been used by chess players around the world to explore new chess ideas. One of his moves 10.Bxh2+ even went down in history and it was executed during a match with the then World Chess Champion. Shortly after the start of the game, in his 10th move Junior sacrificed a piece! The game finally ended in a draw. It is a regret that Junior is no longer a developed engine. Surely his long-time fans would love to use his unique abilities again. The last version of Junior can boast a playing strength of about 3000 Elo - so it can still be a useful tool for e.g. analysis of chess games. Shredder - multiple-time World Computer Chess Champion. An engine that basically has no major weaknesses. Incredibly solid positional play at a very high level, Strength of play around 3200 Elo. Never makes "stupid" moves, never takes unnecessary risks, plays in such a way that the opponent eventually loses and loses. Great as an analytical tool to check for errors in the game. Shredder is a kind of "Petrosjan" among chess engines. According to my sources, 2022 could be the year in which the next version of this so great engine will be released! The style of play of chess engines undoubtedly had and has an impact on the results achieved. Back in the 90's and at the beginning of this century, the engines mostly played very aggressively, their Creators strove for them to achieve the best results against other engines. The engine "ranking" machine began to unravel. Modern engines and those already classic still under development (Hiarcs, Fritz, Shredder) have a great "knowledge" of positional play and "understanding" of chess positions. For an average chess player who wants to train with a computer, or play an interesting and satisfying game with it, it doesn't matter whether the engine plays at 3500 Elo, 3200 Elo, or 2900 Elo. That's why it's good to see that the chess engine manufacturers pay more and more attention to further development of the training possibilities of chess engines - which can now play at different levels and in different styles for the benefit of us - the users. Do the strongest chess engines play any particular style ? Yes and no. No, because for us humans, the game of an engine at the level of 3500 Elo against an engine of similar playing strength is basically incomprehensible. In 99.99% of the cases there are no spectacular sacrifices or tactical plays and attacks that bring success. Such situations are possible when engines with very different playing strengths or radically changed parameters meet. The strongest engines, except for a few, are programmed not to play in a certain style, but to achieve the highest possible playing strength measured in Elo points. Yes, because from the "engine point of view" -> of a player at the 3500 Elo level, it will certainly see the different playing styles of his computer opponents ;-) Of course, enthusiasts and fans of computer chess struggles can certainly perceive nuances in the play of certain engines. Similarly, this is the case when an art critic looks at paintings by world-famous painters and sees differences that are clear to him - to an ordinary viewer these paintings may be at best... pretty. The same principle applies to engines that "paint" chess through their movements. You are welcome to discuss in the comments section and express your opinion :-)

You're using a computer from Apple's Mac family. You work, play, browse social media, watch movies, or listen to music. You sometimes want to run a cool Windows-only program on your Mac, like Chessmaster, or maybe you need to use ChessBase regularly. Is this possible on a Mac, and if so, is it easy and comfortable? The answer to all these questions is: Yes! In this article I will describe how to use chess programs designed for Windows on a Mac. First, a brief historical background. Back 10-15 years ago, when computers and software were far less powerful than they are today, using Windows and programs written for it was usually problematic on Macs. The computers of that time allowed you to run, for example, a Windows virtual machine in macOS, but its performance left a lot to be desired. One solution, although not very practical, was the introduction by Apple of a solution called BootCamp, which allowed the installation of Windows "alongside" macOS. The user could then use Windows and programs fully and with good performance, but was forced to exit macOS, reboot their Mac, and only then could they use Windows. However, today Macs are fast enough (especially with the M1, M2, etc. CPUs) that it's possible, comfortable, and relatively easy to use the benefits of macOS and its applications and Windows applications simultaneously. In the first image of this article, I posted a screenshot where we see macOS Monterey along with Windows 11 running and the chess programs Chessmaster, ChessBase 16, Scid vs. Mac. Certainly, if you look online for guidance you will find many options such as Virtual Box, UTM, VMware Fusion and others. I will present you dear reader the most convenient and best way to use Windows software on your Mac. Footnote: This article is not sponsored. The opinions below are those of the author alone. Parallels Desktop Source: Parallels Parallels Desktop (PD) is a commercial program that runs on Intel and Apple Silicon-based Macs. Its strength is that the user can use macOS system and applications and at the same time work with, for example, ChessBase or train with Fritz. Of course, using PD and Windows there is no obstacle to use any other software, such as Microsoft Office, games or Auto Cad, etc. Steam for Windows 11 in... macOS :-) The author of this article over the years has not encountered a situation in which any of the Windows programs did not work using PD. A great and very useful option is the ability to use Windows programs in the same way as Mac programs. Below in the image, an open window with Fritz and a Windows Explorer window. Chess Assistant and ChessBase. You can also use macOS programs and Windows programs at the same time - without losing performance! Microsoft Excel for Mac and Deep Shredder for Windows. Safari web browser and Play Chess server. Examples can be multiplied. Parallels Desktop for Mac is a mature program created by professionals and recognized by millions of Mac users. Each released version is always updated and extended with new features. Based on his own experience, the author of this article confirms that the manufacturer also cares about the ever-increasing speed of PD, which can be seen especially on Mac computers with the M1 processor. Using Parallels Desktop, it feels like the same work and/or play as on a Windows PC. So what do you need to use Windows programs on macOS ? The requirements are not high. The latest version of Parallels Desktop is available for many Mac operating systems. Source: Wikipedia This means that even older Macs are supported and can use modern Parallels Desktop. Parallels Desktop does not have large hardware requirements, below is a sample specification. Source: Parallels Amount of RAM. For an Intel-based Mac, a Mac with 8GB of RAM or better yet 12GB or more is sufficient for satisfactory operation. It's worth mentioning that using a Mac with an M1 processor, 8GB of ram guarantees comfortable work. With a Mac and macOS meeting the Parallels Desktop requirements, you still need Windows. Parallels Desktop allows you to automatically download Windows from the Microsoft website and install it. Of course, to enjoy the full version of Windows, the user should provide your own Microsoft Windows license key, purchase Windows directly from within Parallels Desktop, or transfer an existing Boot Camp partition with Windows already installed. And that's all :) Once Windows is installed, you can use it, install software, and do everything just as you would on a regular PC. For ordinary users, the Parallels Desktop is so easy that with just a few clicks, there is no need for any specialized intervention in the Windows download and installation process itself. Parallels Desktop will automatically adjust all parameters to make Windows perform at its best. It is worth knowing that Parallels Desktop allows you to use different Linux distributions and using several different operating systems at the same time! Debian GNU Linux Debian (PyChess) and Windows (Chessmaster). Parallels Desktop is the best and most convenient solution to use Windows programs on macOS. I highly recommend trying out Parallels Desktop. The manufacturer provides a trial version which works for 14 days without any limitations. VMware Fusion Source: VMware VMware Fusion (VF) is a commercial program by VMware. Like Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion has a long tradition of providing MAC users with the ability to install Windows. VMware Fusion is less powerful than Parallels Desktop. On the same Mac, the latest version of VMware Fusion is several percent to tens of percent less efficient than Parallels Desktop. This is probably due to the fact that VMware focuses on a very broad market and many products related to virtualization of software and IT systems, providing mainly business customers with many specialized solutions. Parallels Desktop, on the other hand, is software which for several years has been developed by the producer in the tiniest details in order to ensure the best possible integration of Windows with macOS. VMware Fusion has higher hardware and software requirements than Parallels Desktop. Source: VMware VMware Fusion does not offer the ability to automatically install Windows or Linux through a wizard. The user must install the operating system himself. Once the operating system is installed, it is fully usable for all applications, e.g. work, games, internet. If you don't care strongly about big convenience and native virtual machine speed, then VMware Fusion may be the solution to your needs. CrossOver CrossOver (CO) is a commercial program by CodeWeavers that allows you to run multiple programs written for Microsoft Windows. CrossOver does not need Windows to run, for example, the Arena program. CO works differently. It's not an emulator. It does the work of translating Windows commands into Mac commands so that you can run Windows software as if it were designed native to Mac. CrossOver works with all kinds of software - productivity software, utility programs, and games - all with one application. That sounds interesting, doesn't it ? You don't need Windows, so you don't need to buy Windows to use the application, right ? Unfortunately, that's not quite the case. CrossOver works with a large number of programs, but at the same time it can't run many other programs. For example, using CrossOver works good (not perfectly) with Fritz 12 or ChessBase 9, but it is impossible to run Fritz 16 and newer versions. The same is true of ChessBase; older versions work fine, newer ones will not run. Source: CrossOver Source: CrossOver A working Arena program for Windows running on macOS using CrossOver. Below are the requirements of the CrossOver program. As you can see, the program is being developed; there are several versions of CrossOver for many macOS systems. Source: Codeweavers I mainly recommend CrossOver to those people who want to work with one or at most several chess programs. However, you should check in advance whether this program or these programs will work with CrossOver at all. The developer offers a 14-day trial version with no restrictions. In conclusion, a chess player who wants to use Windows software on a Mac can do so conveniently and without any restrictions using Parallels Desktop software. There is a lot of useful chess software for Macs - I encourage you to read the article titled: Tools in a chess player's workshop - Mac. Sometimes, however, out of habit, sometimes out of sentiment, when we want to play, among others with Chessmaster or train with Fritz - and we want to do it on our own Mac - then Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion will come in handy.

What are chess engine parameters ? Is it worth changing them? When is it worth changing engine parameters ? What does changing parameters do ? What influence do they have on the strength and style of the engine? .... Before we answer these questions, I propose we watch a chess game between the Zappa and Nimzo engines. 15 white's move. Zappa sacrifices Knight. Fen: r2q1rk1/p2nbNp1/b1p1pn1p/8/2pP4/2B3PB/P1QNPP1P/R4RK1 b - - 0 15 White's 20th move. Zappa sacrifices a second figure. Fen: r6r/p2nbk2/b3Bnpp/q1p1B3/2pP4/5NP1/P1Q1PP1P/R4RK1 b - - 0 20 Paul Morpy, Mikhail Tal - giants of the tactical games. The difficulty of playing against such strong and aggressive chess players is that all it takes is one mistake or sometimes one inaccurate move and the game is lost or - at most - ends in a draw (with a lot of luck). Nimzo has just committed such an inaccuracy. He had the game won, but instead of playing 21...Nxe5 he chose 21... Bb7, which according to Stockfish engine, equalized the game. Zappa took advantage of this inaccuracy by playing a strong 22.e4! In the end, after all the storming on the chessboard, this game ended in a draw. Zappa played with a parameters called Dessident Aggressor, (parameters author: Robert Flesher) which transformed the playing style of this engine to that of a mad attacking grandmaster who doesn't hesitate to sacrifice pawns and pieces to smash the opponent's King. Zappa version Mexico II on my hardware (4 processors) with default parameters plays with a strength of about 2950 Elo. Nimzo in version 8 on my hardware plays with a strength of 2500 Elo. Based specifically on this change in Zappa's engine parameters (Dessident Aggressor), you can see that his style of play has changed dramatically, the strength of play has decreased by about 300 Elo points. Ultimately, this match consisting of 10 chess games won by Zappa, but Nimzo was not without chances. I am making 10 games of this match available for download in .PGN format. From a chess man's point of view, this match played by engines at grandmaster level in fascinating style. It was certainly not a boring duel. The author of this article found it hard to tear himself away from looking at chess games played in beautiful style, full of sacrifices and various tactics. Okay. That is, we know that changing the parameters affects the strength and playing style of the chess engine. Now let's see what parameters we can change in several different engines: both older and newest ones. Phalanx XXII engine - we do not have the ability to change any parameter. Booot engine - we can only change the number of Threads (cores). Tiger engine in Gambit version - we have several parameters to change, including Gambit level. Goliath Light 1.5 engine, also we can change several parameters, including Selectivity for example. Modern Nemorino 6.00 engine - and here we can change several parameters, including selecting EvalFile. Another modern and very powerful Fire 8 engine - also we can change several parameters, including Contempt. Currently (March 2022) the most powerful chess engine Stockfish 14.1 - gives us the possibility to change parameters including e.g. Skill Level. Zappa Mexico II, which was one of the participants in the match described above. We can configure Zappa with many parameters, including for example Enable mate Extensions. Nimzo, an engine that has many different parameters to change, including the value of figures. As you can see in the picture, for example, Nimzo values Bishop (435) a bit more than Knight (420). Deep Hiarcs 14 WSCS, an engine with a reputation for playing in a very human-like style - has some interesting paraemtras to change, including Position Learning. Dragon 2.6.1 by Komodo, is a super powerful engine that has many parameters in the configuration menu to change, including Use MCTS. And the last of the engines I chose for the purpose of this article - TheKing 3.50, which is the engine that drives the Chessmaster series programs. It has a lot of parameters to change including, for example, Selective Search. The potential for change in TheKing engine, has encouraged many talented chess players to change its parameters. As we can see in the listing below, in the case of Chessmaster 11 the default parameter settings of the TheKing engine turned out to be weaker than the parameters set by users ! Source: CCRL From the data I've shown, we can infer that it's worth changing the engine parameters if we want to try to increase the engine's play strength and/or change the engine's play style. Dear reader, you should know that there is not some standard of names for parameters that affect the play of chess engines. Each developer at his own discretion introduces (or not) parameters for possible engine reconfiguration. Below I will try to collect the most commonly used chess engine parameters, name them, and describe the effect on the engine's behavior during play and analysis. Let me not discuss in detail the parameters whose names clearly indicate the function they perform, e.g. Enable Mate Extensions or Eval File, etc. Hash Hash arrays are areas of memory where a program can store positions and ratings when calculating moves in a game. If the program encounters the same position again, it can simply retrieve its rating from the hash tables instead of analyzing it all over again (which takes more time). Hash tables greatly increase the playing power of a program. This is especially true with modern and powerful engines. Some of them fill up the Hash very quickly. Specifies the maximum amount of memory (in MB = Mega Byte) that can be used per transposition table - a major factor in performance - especially the performance of modern chess engines. It is usually best to use half the available RAM per Hash, but a smaller Hash size will slightly improve performance in a fast game, such as 5 minutes for the entire game. In modern chess programs, hash tables can fill up very quickly, so an optimal hash table size may not be achievable, especially when deep searching or using a deep analysis program, or when the amount of memory on a given machine is limited. In these cases, the rule of thumb is to set the hash table size as large as possible without sacrificing system performance. If your computer uses a super-fast SSD (solid state drive), then even exceeding half the RAM for the hash table may not slow down the chess engine and operating system. If you use the chess engine for deep analysis or playing long time games, then I recommend setting the Hash parameter to the highest possible value, keeping in mind the engine and operating system speed. For ordinary applications, the engine needs only 128 to 512 MB of memory for Hash; slightly smaller and larger values should not affect its operation negatively. In some GUIs, such as Fritz, Shredder while the engine is running, we can see the rate expressed in percentage, which capacity of the Hash is used. This is a useful information, which without the need for complex calculations shows if the engine is "choking" on available Hash memory, or if it has enough. Threads Threads / Cores / CPU. This is an important parameter that affects the speed (calculation) of the chess engine. If you need the maximum playing power of a chess engine, then set the Threads configuration option to a value smaller than the number of physical cores of your computer. For example: use 7 on a 8-core computer. This will leave one core available for other programs and operating system while the chess engine runs in the background. There is a Hyper-Threading option in some processors. As new processors evolve, their capabilities change—the general rule is not to use more threads than physical cores. For ordinary uses, such as quick analysis of a chess game, finding threats, or training with the engine - just set Threads to 1. Nowadays, modern chess engines even on a single Threads play at more than 3000 Elo, enough power for most purposes. Contempt The Contempt option lets you override the chess engine so that it more or less avoids draws. More precisely, this option sets how much the engine should favor its own positions and the values of its pieces and pawns. In simpler words, Contempt makes the chess engine more or less confident in its work. Different engines accept different range of Contempt values, so I suggest you read the technical documentation of the engine in question, where this parameter and its influence on engine operation should be described. The default Contempt value of an engine means its optimal play against any opponent. It is a good idea to change the Contempt value if you expect to play against a much weaker opponent or against a much stronger opponent; this can improve game results. For example, by appropriately setting Contempt against a weaker opponent, an engine will only exchange and dispose of pieces and pawns when it determines that its position evaluation will significantly increase in its favor. With Contempt against a stronger opponent, the engine will try to get rid of pieces as often as possible to weaken the opponent's strength. Selectivity The Selectivity parameter can be used to adjust the aggressiveness of the position tree search while the engine is running. Usually higher values encourage the chess engine to trim the position tree more aggressively which leads to deeper overall searches and increases the risk of missing some moves. Changing the selectivity parameter makes sense when, for example, analyzing a position full of tactical possibilities - which can help the engine find the precise line of play faster. For complex positions with positional play - I do not recommend changing the Selectivity parameter. King Safety This controls how high the engine rates the King security. The higher the value, the greater the effects of attacks on the King. Like Selectivity, this parameter can have a significant impact on a chess engine's play style. I suggest looking at the Dessident Agressor parameters of the Zappa engine. Here are the parameters Dessident Agressor for the Zappa Mexico II chess engine, created by Robert Flesher. After changing the King Safety parameter (and others) from the default 100 to 500, this engine pays much less attention to the safety of your King when playing, throwing all your forces into the attack, LMR LMR = Late Move Reduction is a search technique that aims to reduce certain moves in the search tree so that you can get more overall depth. However, this can sometimes result in good moves being missed. I don't recommend turning on LMR during, for example, a position analysis where we need a very accurate search. Null Move This is another technique (like LMR) for removing moves from the search tree. This parameter can be useful when you have a difficult position that cannot be solved easily and you want to see if a shallower but more accurate search would help you find a good move - then it is worth turning off the Null Move parameter. Most modern engines play much more strongly with the Null Move option enabled, because they use different techniques and have very effective position evaluation functions, which in the vast majority of cases do not miss important moves and lines. Numa This is a parameter that affects the organization of RAM and Threads usage by the chess engine. For engines running in Linux and Mac systems, this parameter is automatically set to the best value in 99% of engines. On Windows system, NUMA should be left unchanged in most cases. NUMA can have a very significant impact on engine performance up to +-25%. Changing this parameter can also be useful when running, for example, two or more instances of the same chess engine. If you are not sure whether changing this parameter is beneficial, I suggest leaving its default value. Large Pages Some chess engines can use so-called Large Memory Pages. It is only possible, if Large Pages is provided by the operating system. When Large Pages is enabled, engine speedup can range from 5% to 15%, depending on the size of the Hash board. How to enable access to Large Pages ? For example, in Windows this requires changes in advanced system settings. Inquisitive readers may be referred to the website of the operating system manufacturer. Futulity / Futulity Pruning This parameter turns on or off the use of the technique by the chess engine to discard moves that are not promising to find the best line. Futulity Pruning is another way to increase the speed and depth of the search. In the vast majority of cases turning this parameter on gives good results. Mobility It is a parameter that describes a measure of the number of choices (legal moves) a player has in a given position. It is often used as a term in the chess engine evaluation function. It is based on the assumption that the more choices a player has, the stronger the position. There is a correlation between a player's mobility and the number of games won. Depending on the position in question, changing this parameter can have a big impact on the strength and playing style of the chess engine. Learning (Book, Position, etc.) This is a parameter that determines the chess engine's ability to learn certain behaviors when analyzing and playing chess. It allows chess engine to learn from the games it plays. This can improve its play in future games. For example, in the initial phase of the game a move made by the chess engine which resulted in a worse position will not be selected in the next game with the same position. It is a good idea to have this parameter turned on if you frequently use the same engine. Level of play / Skill / Strength / Elo / UCI Elo This is a parameter that affects the play strength of the chess engine. Since this parameter is implemented differently in engines, depending on the engine you choose, I suggest you read the technical documentation. If we need the maximum playing strength of the engine, then I suggest not changing the default value of this parameter. Tablebases / Use Tablebases / Nalimov / Syzygy / Gaviota Don't use this parameter if you don't want the engine to access database tables to improve endgame. Why should you not use this parameter ? Because, for example, you don't have access to Tablebases, or you want to see how the engine evaluates endgame position using its own algorithm instead of using Tablebases. MCTS Monte-Carlo Tree Search this is the name of the parameters enabling MCTS algorithm with which the chess engine will work. Enabling MCTS can dramatically change the way a chess engine plays. Today (March 2022), engines running with the MCTS parameter enabled play with a playing strength slightly lower than when using the traditional algorithm (from the Alpha-Beta family) by about 50-100 Elo. It is worth noting that over the last few years, engines using the MCTS algorithm have made colossal strides in terms of playing strength. It is possible that in the near future the development and use of the MCTS algorithm by chess engines will further increase their playing strength. Due to the nature of the MCTS algorithm, it is worth using it in complex poses where you want to see the result of multi-line analysis. Multi-line analysis in an engine using the MCTS algorithm will not lead to a decrease in its speed. NNUE This is a parameter that determines whether the chess engine should use neural network architecture to evaluate positions during search. Engines that support NNUE typically play 100 or more Elo points stronger than their predecessors using traditional chess position evaluation methods. If you want the engine to play at maximum strength, then turn on the NNUE parameter. It is worth noting that according to some chess players and experts, engines that use NNUE play stronger, but more "machine-like". This is, for example, one of the reasons why the author of the Hiarcs engine, Mr. Mark Uniacke, did not implement this technique in his engine, wanting to preserve its characteristic - human style of play. Lines / PV / Multi PV Typically, we can choose a number. This parameter will determine the number of analysis lines that the engine will show during operation. For example, if you only want to see the best move that the engine "sees", then the Multi PV parameter should be set to 1. If, for example, you want to see 2 best moves along with analysis lines, then set this parameter to 2. In some chess GUIs like Hiarcs, Fritz we can set this parameter with clicks. This parameter is often not available in older chess engines or development versions. Log / Logs Logging the GUI / engine communication to a file in the (custom) same directory as the chess engine. For chess players using chess engines for lengthy and difficult analysis of chess positions (e.g. for correspondence chess players), setting engine parameters can be a key factor in achieving an advantage or even winning a chess game. Undoubtedly, a good correspondence chess player, in addition to being able to adjust the engine's play through parameters, has a wealth of chess knowledge that allows him to win chess games and tournaments. Why change the parameters of chess engines ? In addition to the answers given when discussing the various parameters, I might add... for fun or to search for interesting ideas in chess openings or middle games :-) If talented experimenters did not change the settings of, for example, TheKing engine, we would not get a stronger version of it. Similarly for the Zappa engine and others. If you want an engine to work for you, to choose from: tactical monster, precise defender or optimistic position player, etc., etc. then it's worth at least trying to enjoy playing with the chess engine parameters. I am not urging you to change the parameters of chess engines. For the average chess player, the engine parameters are set optimally, providing play and analysis at the expected level. But if you want to "squeeze" the maximum out of the engine, then maybe it's worth to start experimenting ?

What can help a chess player more than quick access to key information that will help in every area of the chess art ? In short, an up-to-date database with chess games and software for its effective use. You will discover how to find exactly the chess games you want. This part of the course is prepared in Chess Assistant version 20 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions. Thanks to the possibilities offered by Chess Assistant you can find chess games with three duplicated pawns, four Queens, a pawn attack on h4 field in the dragon variant of Sicilian defense, and hundreds of positions with unusual endings - so called chess fortresses - from the last 5 years for chess players with rating over 2300 Elo. Is anything... limiting us in this search? Only our imagination. To begin with, I suggest opening a large database with at least several hundred thousand games. In this part of the course, I will be using Hugebase provided with the Chess Assistant program. On the toolbar, click Search - General... Instead, you can simply expand the magnifying glass icon on the additional toolbar and click General. Note especially - few tabs at the top of the Search: window. Each tab represents a different thematic set of criteria that can be used to search for chess games. Only those games that meet the criteria you specified will remain in the list of searched games. The remaining games will not be visible until you complete your search. Big Tips... You can download chess games from the Internet by adding them to an existing database; with careful and systematic maintenance, the search will be successful. The downside of this solution is the time-consuming nature of the process. You can also download ready packets of chess games from various websites and similarly to the above described method - add them to the existing database. The downside of this solution is the necessity to verify many (hundreds, thousands of) chess games for correctly entered data and correct them if necessary. This also makes this process very time consuming. From his own experience the author of this course once a year buys the chess games database he is interested in or updates it from a reliable source. When you use Chess Assistant, the natural choice is to get the chess games database from this producer. This way you will get an up-to-date database maintained in a correct, meticulous and professional way, which is 100% compatible with the software you use. One of the key reasons to have access to a large, very well maintained chess database is to be able to search every field in the Search: window. If the database is properly maintained and updated, you will be able to get reasonable results. Back to window with Search:. Here's what you'll find in the tabs: Header Search for players, tournaments, years, Elo ratings, etc. Position and material Search for positional fragments, material distribution. Advanced Material search in which the material restrictions are set. Manoeuvres Search for manoeuvres. All of these sections are connected with a logical "and". This means that if a number of criteria are defined all of them must be fulfilled in order for a game to be retrieved. Ok, so let's go ahead and search by setting many different criteria. Search Masterfully, example 1. We are interested in chess games that meet the following conditions: White Elo between 1900 and 2100 Black Elo between 2200 and 2400. Moves range from 41 to 99 Numbers of pieces from 10 to 16 Result 1:0 Event: open (open tournament) The chess game is at least 41 moves or a maximum of 99 moves With opposite color bishops White pawn on c7. For your convenience, I have marked the criteria of interest to us in the appropriate tabs. Note that in the Position and material and Maneuvers tabs, I have inserted a white and black question mark symbol in some chess squares. This is useful when the user is not interested in what piece/s will be on the field marked with two question marks. This procedure also has a positive effect on the search time, which is shorter. On my computer, a database consisting of 6,727,869 chess games was searched in 93 seconds. Chess Assistant found 5 chess games that met the above complex criteria. Below one of these chess games in key positions according to Chess Assistant Search Masterfully, example 2. We are interested in chess games that contain a motif of white attacking the black King's position with the help of the white pawns g4 and h4, the white rook on h1 and after castling made. On the black side with the King defended by Bishop on g7 and supported by Rook on f8 and pawn on h5... ...and meet the following conditions: Players with any rating Elo. Sicilian Defense: dragon A chess game takes a minimum of 15 moves, a maximum of 29. That is, we are interested in a game with not too many moves. Results: 0-1 and 1/2-1/2 With the same Bishop color Maneuvers: move white pawn from g2 to g4 square. White's move. Total numbers of pieces: 20 - 32 For your convenience, I have marked the criteria of interest to us in the appropriate tabs. After click OK button, Chess Assistant found 6 chess games that met the above very complex criteria. Below one of these chess games in key positions according to Chess Assistant. Search Masterfully, example 3. And a final example. This time with less specific search criteria; suppose we are interested in positions similar to those arising in the King's gambit after a short castling of the white King and with an attack of black pawns on f4 and g4. For your convenience, I have marked the criteria of interest to us in the appropriate tabs. After click OK button, ChessAssistant found 7 chess games that met the above criteria. Below one of these chess games in key positions according to Chess Assistant. Concluding this part of the course, I would like to emphasize that using a professionally maintained chess database (which is the Hugebase from ChessOk), we can also find annotated games with diagrams and variants from interesting continuations. CQL search After click Search - CQL search We will move to the CQL query editor. Chess Query Language (CQL) was designed to allow researchers, authors, and players to search for games, problems, and studies that match specific themes. You specify the theme you are looking for, and the database to look for them. Then you run this CQL query . This creates a list that has all the games matching your theme. CQL can find much more complex themes than any other chess database search method. For details, please visit the CQL dedicated webpage. Composite search These are ready-made chess database queries created by the Chess Assistant producer using the CQL language (see description above). Using this option is very, very easy :-) It is visible by clicking Search on the toolbar and select Composite search. A new window named Condition will open. Remember that the Composite search will be done on the database you opened earlier. Specifying criteria is very simple: expand the options tree on the left side of the Condition window and select one what you need. The following shows some examples of searching using Composite search. Search Masterfully, example 4. When clicking on the OK button, you get the search result: 13 games. Note that in each of the chess games found, the pieces were colored to distinguish a particular structure, in this case: Two knights in better endgame, side: White. colored red (white pieces) colored blue (black pieces) Search Masterfully, example 5. Result: Search Masterfully, example 6. Result: Search Masterfully, example 7. Result: Search Masterfully, example 8. Result: Search Masterfully, example 9. Result: Search Masterfully, example 10. Result: Search Masterfully, example 11. Result: Examples can be multiplied many times over. Search combining different techniques The strength of Chess Assistant is its ability to combine various advanced search techniques to achieve a specific goal. In one last example - I will demonstrate exactly this way of working. Search Masterfully, example 12. We are interested in chess games that meet the following conditions: ECO: Ruy Lopez. Berlin defense White Elo between 2500 and 2900 Black Bishop cannot be on the d6 square Materiał restrictions: white pawns 5 to 7 pcs, black pawns 4 to 7 pcs, material difference from 1 to 1 pawn. Numbers of pieces from 16 to 24 Ignore colors: yes Side to move: either Bishop: Any Maneuvers: black King from e8 to d7 For your convenience, I have marked the criteria of interest to us in the appropriate tabs. Once you have entered your search criteria precisely, click on the Search button. Chess Assistant found 53 chess games in Hugebase using these very complicated criteria. We keep looking. We want to find chess games with a motif of a white pawn placed on the f6 square.... We found 12 games with this motif. And the final stage, in which we will look for games in which the white pawn has been moved from f6 to f7 square (close to promotion!). Moving the white pawn from square f6 to f7 can also be in variation. That's all the search criteria :-) Click on the Search button. Perfect! We have found 2 chess games that meet all of our extremely complex search criteria. Below is one of those games, already annotated with comments and analysis. Searching Masterfully using Chess Assistant does not require any special skills or knowledge. With examples I have shown - that regardless of whether the search criteria are very simple (the chess player's name), or very complex consisting of many elements. Using Chess Assistant with well-managed database we can achieve accurate and useful results. This is the end of the course: Chess Assistant - Search Masterfully I invite you to choose the next course :-))

Chess Assistant allows you to use chess engine / engines when working with chess games. For any move or position you can call the engine, which will evaluate the position, suggest a good or interesting continuation, or analyze the chess game noting the good and weak moves, suggesting what to play. The longer the chess engine works, the more confident we can be in its evaluation. Chess Assistant allows you to install multiple chess engines and use one or more of them simultaneously. This part of the course is prepared in Chess Assistant version 20 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions. Depending on the version of Chess Assistant you are using dear reader, your program includes one to several engines that are integrated into Chess Assistant. The very good news is that... Some of the pre-built engines for eg. Stockfish plays with a Grandmaster strength that surpasses even the playing strength of a World Chess Champion! This means, that the results of position analysis and evaluation using the Stockfish engine will be objective and at a very, very high level. How to use chess engines with Chess Assistant - that's what this part of the course is about. Chess engines already installed To see a list of installed chess engines: - go to Tools - Engines setup... Click to enlarge (works with any image) As you can see, Chess Assistant version 20, which I use, offers several pre-installed chess engines. Each of these engines plays with the Chess Master power or more. Rybka and especially Stockfish, are chess engines with playing strength far superior to the strongest humans. Install Chess Engine You can install any chess engine in Chess Assistant that uses the: UCI (Universal Chess Interface) protocol Winboard/Xboard protcol Almost all modern, free and commercial chess engines support the UCI protocol. Chess Assistant by default suggests using a chess engine communication protocol called UCI, since the vast majority of engines can communicate using this protocol. If you would like to add a chess engine released in, say, the early 2000s, then there is a good chance that such an engine will only communicate using the Xboard / Winboard protocol. To install new chess engines, download them, and click Add... button on Engines setup... window. A new window will open: Edit chess programs parameters. To properly add a chess engine to the Chess Assistant program, the empty boxes: Name Type Path Must be filled in. Let's fill them in ! I am going to add a chess engine called Komodo. First, browse button and let's specify the location and file of the Komodo engine. Confirm your selection by clicking on the Open button. Very good! At this stage of adding the engine, the window called Edit chess programs parameters on my computer looks like this: It is worth noting that the Name, Type and Path fields were automatically filled in by Chess Assistant. Of course, if you want, you can shorten and simplify the name of the chess engine so that it is as readable as possible for you. For the author of this course, the name Komodo 12 is more friendly and that is the name I will enter in the Name: field. To allow the engine to use chess tablebases, I recommend checking box Allow usage of EndGame TB ( what tablebases are will be explained later in this part of this course ). It is also worth making a change in the Parameters field, where you will find the Hash tables size (MB) option. By default Chess Assistant set 8MB for hash tables. For the purposes of this part of the course, I set the value 256MB. The size of the Hash table parameter is well described in the Komodo engine documentation. Ok, after making the changes described above, the contents of the Edit chess program parameters window looks like this: After clicking the OK button, the chess engine will be installed. Once the chess engine has been installed correctly, it will be visible in the list of available engines. Excellent! Komodo 12 chess engine has been correctly installed in Chess Assistant. Looking at the list of engines in the Engines setup... window, we see that except for the Komodo 12 and Rybka 2.3.2a engines, the other engines are not clearly named. For example - we don't see in which version Stockfish, Ruffian and other engines are installed. In order to avoid unpleasant surprises by using the wrong version of the chess engine I recommend that each of the installed engines be properly named in a way understandable for the Chess Assistant user. Below are the changes I made: Delete engine / engines To remove a chess engine that you don't need, just go to the Engines setup window... click on the chosen engine and... ...after confirmation with Remove button - the engine will be removed from the list of engines available in Chess Assistant. This way, we can also remove other unnecessary / unused chess engines from Chess Assistant. After these procedures, my Engines setup... window looks like this: Hold on...in the image above the Stockfish engine is named as: Stockfish 0301219. (I underlined the unnecessarily entered number zero) To edit the incorrectly entered name and other data, click on the engine of your choice and choose Edit.... A well-known window will open, in which we can edit and save the changes by clicking OK. Stockfish 031219 (released in 2019 on Dec. 3) is a version that plays with the strength Stockfish 11. After clicking OK, the Engines setup... window will be closed. Newly installed engine Komodo 12, or even more precisely Komodo 12.1.1 is a very powerful chess engine plays with similar strength to Stockfish 031219. Both engines play at a sky-high strength of about 3400 Elo. By comparison, the playing strength of World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen in December 2021 was 2842 Elo points (rapid time control), which is 558 Elo points less than the Komodo 12.1.1 chess engine ! Click on this link - if you want to learn more about the Elo ranking system. Go chess engines, go chess...! Let's check the operation of the Komodo 12 chess engine - click on the Infinite analysis icon marked with a red border. Oh yes, it works ! Below the notation window, will be shown the lines that the Komodo 12 engine considered sorted by search depth (d=7, d=19, d=20,..., d=25). When you click on the Engine tab in the Game header window, you will see the movement that the Komodo 12 engine is "thinking" about. Now let's try Stockfish. A free chess engine called Stockfish, which comes with Chess Assistant, provides perfect integration with all Chess Assistant options and capabilities. The latest version Stockfish chess engine can be downloaded from the official website. (it is developed by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott, Tord Romstad, Stéphane Nicolet, Stefan Geschwentner, and Joost VandeVondele, with many contributions from a community of open-source developers.). Working with chess engine / engines As you may have guessed, working with chess engine-who can play chess with a strength far superior to that of any human player - produces very good results. And this is indeed the case. You can add several different chess engines to analyze. With a game board, expand the Infinite analysis icon and select Infinite analysis... or simply use the shortcut Ctrl+Space. In the new window named Start analysis, expand Scheme: and click on Multivariation (2 engines) Good. Here is what the Start analysis window looks like now. Let's pay attention to the fields named Parameters, where we can select chess engines to analyze the positions on the chessboard. For example, in the Parameters field related to Panel 1, after expanding Engine: we have a choice of Komodo 12 and Rybka v2.3.2a engines. After selecting the engines to analyze, click OK in the Start analysis window. As we can see, two chess engines ( Komodo 12 and Stockfish 031219 ) simultaneously analyze the initial position of a chess game. If you have more than one chess engine running, you can remove it with by right-clicking on the engine analysis area and selecting Close analysis. The more chess engines you open to analyze, the more impact it will have on your computer's resources. In 1994 a set of chessboard positions was created to test the chess engines of the time. One of the positions was then briefly summarized by Mr. Bruce Moreland, who stated: "I don't think that anyone (chess engine) has ever solved this one." Here's that position: Fen notation: r2qk2r/ppp1b1pp/2n1p3/3pP1n1/3P2b1/2PB1NN1/PP4PP/R1BQK2R w - - 0 1 I will show you how powerful is modern chess engine.... Let's start Komodo 12 :-) After... 12 seconds I get result: Just 12 seconds after running Komodo 12, we got the result of the analysis - the strongest move Nxg5 in that position was found. It is worth noting that looking at the lines of analysis in the image above, we see that the Komodo 12 engine was already considering the best move Nxg5 in this position in the first second of analysis! It is worth looking closely at the listing of analyzed lines by the chess engine, because the considered moves can inspire us - Users - to find interesting continuations and game plans. If we need to analyze several lines at the same time, we again go to the Start analysis window and in the Scheme: select Multivariation (1 engine) and in the Variations: set how many lines of analysis we need. Click OK button and we can see that the Nxg5 move is by far the strongest continuation. Twenty-five years after this position was published, the unsolvable task was solved in... 12 seconds ! I would like to emphasize that the quality of position and game analysis by chess engines has increased incredibly over the last quarter of a century. It is beneficial to use the proposals of modern chess engines like Stockfish or Komodo, because they are able to quickly, efficiently and accurately offer every chess player objective and accurate suggestions, continuation plans, search for errors and inaccuracies or analyze chess games. Understanding the result of chess engines work As you may remember, in the content of this course above - I opened Komodo 12 to analyze a position that 25 years had been considered unsolvable for chess engines. Let's recall what was shown. The result of Komodo 12's work was revealed in a separate window named Engine and included from the top of this window from left to right: Current analysis time: 13 seconds Number analyze move / number of all moves to analyze: 01/43 Best move: Nxg5 The number of all checked positions: 12284 kn The number of positions checked per second: 978 kn/s The number of table bases hits: 0 Chess engine name: Komodo 12 Chess engines evaluate positions with the help of a numeric value. The evaluation is expressed in pawn units, always from the point of view of White. Piece Value in pawn units Pawn 1.0 Knight 3.0 Bishop 3.0 Rook 5.0 Queen 9.0 If the program is displaying a value of +1.30, this means that it considers the white position to be better by the equivalent of 1.3 pawns. If White is actually a pawn up, then the additional 0.3 is the result of positional considerations (mobility, deployment of pieces, king safety, pawn structure, etc.). A display of –3.00 means that White is a piece down – either a bishop or a knight, which are both equivalent to about three pawns. Rooks are worth five and the queen about nine pawns. Of course the king's value is unlimited – lose it and you've lost the game. Always it is the case: positive values favour White, negative values favour Black. In addition to the precise pawn values, the evaluation is also given in standard chess symbols: To show how chess engine "thinks" when it analyzes a position, let's use the setting on the board according to the image below. Fen notation: r2qk2r/ppp1b1pp/2n1p3/3pP1N1/3P4/2PB2N1/PP4PP/R1BbK2R w KQkq - 0 2 We consider lines of analysis from the bottom of the listing to the top. d=7 [-0.51] 2.Nxe6 Qd7 (0:00:00) Black is slightly better d=23 [+0.65] 2.Nxe6 Qb8 3.Nxg7 (0:00:29) White is slightly better d=25 [+1.51] 2.Nxe6 Qb8 3.Nxg7 (0:01:23) White is clearly better And finally, after a few extra seconds engine Komodo 12 at the same depth (d=25) "sees" complete winning line for white. It is worth noting, the change in engine evaluation of the position over time and with the increasing depth of the search for the best move and continuation. The longer chess engine analyzes and the deeper it searches, the more accurate his evaluation of the position becomes. Threat The picture shows a position from famous chess game between Rotlewi Georg vs Rubinstein Akiba played in Poland in Lodz city in 1907. This beautiful chess game and commentaries were opened from a database called Hugebase provided with Chess Assistant. White's move. Fen notation: 2rr2k1/1b2qppp/pb2p3/1p2P3/1P3Pn1/P1NB4/1B2Q1PP/R4R1K w - - 0 1 What threatens white if there were black on the move ? You can use chess engine to find the threat in that and any position. Open the Start analysis window (Ctrl+Space). In Scheme: select Chronological (1 engine) and check the box Opponent's moves. The result is a listing of the most serious threat at a given position. There might well be more than one threat, and so make sure that the your chess engine is analyzing more than one line at a time. After right-clicking the analysis listing, let's select Multivariation mode. You can also simply click on the Multivariation mode icon. The threat analysis listing will expand the next variations with the three threats. In our example, engine analyzes four lines. Inserting analysis into notation You can insert the main analysis line of the chess engine directly into the game notation. To do this, make sure you select the Engine tab (the window under the chessboard), right-click in the analysis field, and select Insert_line. You can also simply click on the Insert analysis in game icon. The strongest line at current moment will be inserted into the notation. The more lines at a time chess engine analyzes, the less accurate the result of the analysis will be than if chess engine analyzes only one line - I recommend especially such to correspondence chess players. The greater number of lines at once analyzed by chess engine allows for more insight into the chess player's evaluation of the position - I recommend this to chess players who want quick analysis results for several possible continuations - not necessarily the strongest. Tablebase There are a total of 64 pieces on the chessboard in the starting position. The total number of possible moves is so unimaginably large that chess will remain an unsolvable game for a very, very long time. But... during each game the number of pieces and pawns decreases with time due to the players' moves, and one by one they disappear from the chessboard. After a certain number of moves, it is not uncommon for the situation on the chessboard to go into the so-called endgame phase. In a situation where e.g. a few pieces remain on the board, is it possible to use solutions that will help chess engine to analyze chess positions even more accurately? Yes! The answer is Tablebase. For us Chess Assistant users, it is important to know and take advantage of this knowledge that the cooperation between chess engine and Tablebase significantly increases chess engine ability to deliver accurate results in endgames. Chess engine using Tablebase will be even faster and more accurate - catching transitions to winning continuations in endgames, typically providing, for example, the exact line of the continuation and the number of moves to mate the opponent or achieve the desired draw. The concept of using a Tablebase is not new, so over the last few years with the development of computers and the increase in computing power, several Tablebases with different capabilities have emerged. Chess Assistant uses Nalimov Tablebases, which are also used by many chess engines. The filenames often end with the suffix .nbw.emd or .nbb.emd (for Nalimov Bases White/Black). All 3, 4 and 5 piece Nalimov tablebases can be used in Chess Assistant. Let's install 4 piece Nalimov Tablebases ( size: 30 MB only ) After entering the Engines setup... window (Alt+F11) in the Endgame Tablebases path field you need to specify the location of Nalimov's Tablebases. Click on the button marked with a red border. In the newly opened window named Folder list dialog, click on the Add button. Select the appropriate folder and confirm by clicking Ok. Click the OK button. Bravo! We installed 4 piece Nalimov's Tablebases. They are visible as another engine - EndGameTB, so we can access them in the same way as we start a chess engine like Stockfish. When the position is reached in Tablebases, detailed information will be displayed in the window. Fen notation: k7/1nR5/8/8/2K5/8/8/8 w - - 0 1 If you are interested in the details between the different Tablebases, I recommend the excellent article on the ChessBase website; one example: a big advantage of the Syzygy Endgame Tablebases is that they are much smaller than others Tablebases. The 6-man Syzygy tablebases need 150 GB disc space, whereas the Nalimov Tablebase need more than 1 TB. Due to the size of the complete Nalimov Tablebase (more than 1 TB), I recommend installing them outside the C: drive, for example in D:\Nalimov Analysis chess game First, open a chess game for analysis. In this example we will analyze a previously mentioned chess game between Rotlewi Georg vs Rubinstein Akiba played in Poland in Lodz city in 1907. Now, on the toolbar, go to Engines - Game analysis and choose Comment game using tree. In the newly opened Adjust commenting window, make sure all the boxes of available options are checked. Thus, comments on the moves in the analyzed game will be appropriate. After clicking OK, the game comments will be shown in the notation window after a while. Ok, let's delete all the comments... ...And let's try another option to analyze the entire chess game: Select method using time. Depending on the time you indicate, Chess Assistant will automatically select the parameters. Here are some examples: Ok, suppose we want the chess engine to spend a maximum of 5 minutes analyzing an entire chess game. After selecting the analysis time and after specifying the chess engine, click OK. Chess Assistant will open the Quick analysis window where we can observe the progress of chess game analysis. After a maximum of 5 minutes, you get a much richer commentary analysis of the entire chess game than if you select the Comment game using tree option. Again, remove all comments from the notation window. This time, let's choose an analysis option called Select method using levels. In the newly opened window called Dialog we can choose in detail parameters for the analysis of the whole chess game or a selected range of moves. To use the full range of these possibilities I'll open another and this time long chess game played at a very high level between the strongest grandmasters of their time, which abounded in interesting moves and finished late... promotions of pawns to Queens. A chess game between Chigorin Mikhail vs Rubinstein Akiba played in the Czech Republic in the city of Carlsbad in 1907. Returning to the Dialog window, below are my selected settings for analyzing an entire chess game. The number next to the selected options, e.g. Main analysis:10 -> is the number of seconds needed to analyze each chess move of the given option, in this case - Main analysis. I recommend that before running this analysis method, you should consider the analysis time of the entire chess game. After clicking OK button, Chess Assistant using Komodo 12 chess engine and Nalimov's Tablebases - will start analyzing the whole chess game. While waiting for the result, we can watch the analysis progress... The entire analysis process took about 17 minutes. It is worth remembering that, depending on your needs, we can use the Select method using levels option to select parameters that will allow a more precise analysis of specific stages of the game (e.g. middle game, end game), searching for errors, etc. than using more standard methods such as time-based analysis (Select method using time as a single and decisive parameter) or simple Comment game using tree. The stronger chess engine - the less time it takes for accurate tactical analysis Analyze current position When you click to Engines - Analyze current position... You can select specific moves to be analyzed by the chess engine. This can be useful when, for example, we know which moves are weak or losing, but we want to analyze only those that make sense in a given chess position. 14...cxb5 or 14...Nb4 ? Fen notation: 1nbq1rk1/4bppp/1rp1p3/pP1nP3/2pP4/2N2NP1/1PQB1PBP/R4RK1 b - - 0 14 In this famous position that arose in a chess game between World Champion Magnus Carlsen and Grandmaster Mamedyarov Shakhriyar, black choose 14...cxb5. Let's check. In this example, out of 36 possible moves for white, I left only 2 moves for analysis (120 seconds per moves to be analyzed). After entering parameters and clicking OK button, once the analysis is complete - the result will be pasted into notation. Let's compare the two notation entries. Old annotations: New annotations: The analysis focused on the 2 selected moves showed that the move 14 ... cxb5 made in the chess game was weaker than 14 ... Nb4. In this chess game, the World Champion showed that by playing a move weaker by only 0.59 is enough for him to build a decisive advantage. Background analysis ...and other analysis options Background analysis can be run through the Engines - Background analysis toolbar... ...Or by opening the context menu of the notation window: Background analysis with its very detailed options can be used for further interesting ways to work with chess games. I encourage you to explore many other possibilities for analysis using Chess Assistant. Other options that are available from the Engines toolbar, such as Engine-Engine / Tournament or Test suites, etc. are not standard functions of the chess database software or are relatively rarely used by most users (Marker setup/delete...). In Chess Assistant, they are prepared to be used in a very basic way. For example, to run chess engine matches and / or tournaments, I recommend using dedicated software for these activities (eg. Aquarium, Fritz, Arena, Shredder Classic, Hiarcs Chess Explorer, etc.). As we can see, Chess Assistant offers very useful, powerful and rich features for using chess engine/s. This is the end of the course: Chess Assistant - Using chess engines I invite you to choose the next course :-))

I mostly play chess online. This is a convenient and quick way to participate in a chess tournament or to spend time with a friend chatting and playing chess in a suitable online location. The database of my chess games currently contains over 3000 games and is an excellent material for analysis and consideration aimed at improving the quality of my chess play. There is no point in making mistakes if we are not going to learn from them. This part of the course is prepared in Chess Assistant version 20 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions. How to do annotations - that's what this part of the course is about. Annotating game When reviewing a completed chess game or when entering moves, Chess Assistant allows you to add explanations to variants, comments, move ratings (!, !!, ?, ?!, etc.) and positions (+-, ±, -+, =, etc.). First, open the game from your database. In this example, I have chosen a game between LangesNasenhaar vs sedarpl played during a tournament on the PlayChess server 2019.11.11. Black made his thirteenth move. To enter Evaluations and / or Marks on the additional toolbar, select Comments and click on the Annotation editor icon highlighted in red color. A palette of different symbols will be displayed. In the Annotations editor window, we have a wide variety of symbols to choose from ranging from the most commonly used to the somewhat less common. Select the field named Short After and click the symbol: !! Click OK button. In the game notation, the chosen symbol appeared after black's move number 13...Qd7!! If the symbol you entered was inappropriate and you would like to delete it, simply click to the right of the Annotation editor icon in the downward facing triangle - this will expand the option and allow you to select Delete annotation. After using the Delete annotation option, the previously entered symbol: !! will be removed from the notation. Back to the annotation editor. Select the field named Short After and click the symbol: ?! Below the symbol palette, we have fields mostly for entering text, comments or annotations. Let's make sure we have the Short After tab selected and type: Poor chess move. Confirm by clicking on the OK button. We see that the entered symbol: ?! and the comment: Poor chess move. have been inserted into the notation of this chess game. Moving to the Styles tab - we can further underline the move for even easier viewing thirteenth black move and understand the flow of the entire chess game. After clicking the Dubious move square and clicking OK.. ...the notation looks like this: The other options in the rich palette of Annotations editor possibilities are entered in the same way as described above. Using the Annotations editor you can easily add symbols, comments, introductory texts, even media files and many other options that are sure to enrich your chess game notation. The additional Comments toolbar also contains shortcuts to other options (e.g. Control variations, Class, Folders, Styles) that can be accessed by opening the Annotations editor window or directly in the game's annotations window. An interesting option that Chess Assistant offers is the ability to add media to the chess game notation. The camera icon called Add media comments can be used for this. We can add Audio, Video or Image files. In this example, we will add a picture that will be at black's thirteenth move. Choosing Image, select the file and confirm by clicking Open. In the newly opened window named Image we get a preview of the selected image. To confirm the selection, click OK. You have surely noticed, dear reader, that on black's thirteenth move the triangle stamp appeared. If you click on this triangle, Chess Assistant will open the previously indicated image (smile.jpg). Delete... To remove specific components from the notation, right-click in the game notation window and go to Edit - Delete where you can select specifically what you want to remove including all the comments. For example, if you choose to remove All comments from a chess game notation.... WARNING! Delete All Commentary option deletes all text, graphic and media comments! Only movements will stay in the notation. Isn't it empty here? ;-) Adding variations To add a new variation, place the cursor in front of the move in the notation window... ...And simply play the variation on the chessboard. Excellent! Here is the new variation ( 13...Kh8 14.Bxf5 b5 ) after its entry: Deleting variation. From the notation in the image below, I want to remove the variation: 18...c5 deserves consideration. First, place the cursor inside the variation (just click on it) and then after clicking icon Cut current variation (scissors on the additional toolbar)... Select Delete current variation and confirm by clicking OK button. A variation of move eighteen has been removed from the notation. Promoting variation. When you click on the down arrow in the upper right corner of the notation window or you can right-click in the notation window and select Edit - Promote line, the selected variation will be moved up one step in the.notation of that chess game. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+L. After promoting the variation, the notation looks exactly like this: Insert diagram In Chess Assistant it is possible to insert a diagram into the chess notation for each selected move. This is a very useful option that increases the readability of the chess notation and allows you to easily see e.g. the key positions in the commented chess game. In the commented chess game in this case, after black's move 13...f4 we will insert a chess diagram. On the additional toolbar under Comments, click on the chessboard icon named Set/delete diagram. In the newly inserted diagram we see the position created after black's thirteenth move 13...f4. To remove a diagram that has been placed next to a badly chosen chess move, simply select that move - in this case 13...f4 and click again on the chessboard icon named Set/delete diagram. The diagram will be removed. Using Chess Assistant we can add annotations to chess games in many different ways. This is to make the annotations on chess games as clear and attractive as possible, and to help understand the moves made and the flow of the chess games played. This is the end of the course: Chess Assistant - Annotating games I invite you to choose the next course :-))

It is 1980. You have just found out that in the next game of a chess tournament your opponent will be a strong player who occupies the first place in the table. The stakes of this game are very high for you. If you win, you'll gain a higher chess category and a lot of ELO rating points. If you lose... you'd rather not think about it further. You only have one day, and the game is tomorrow. In that one day you want to get the records of all the games played by your tomorrow's opponent in the last 2 years. You don't know if you will have enough time to analyze the debuts and continuations and the plans your opponent uses in the middle game. Ufff. Big of it and only one day... Maybe your colleagues can help you? .... And if not ? ;-) In the days when no one believed that a computer could win against a human in a game of chess, preparation for a game of chess with a future opponent was... "analog" and took a lot of time and often involved many chess players to work together. Unfortunately, not everyone had a friend who played and understood chess at the level of a master or grandmaster. Today, when chess players have access to databases of chess games and specialized software to work with such databases, preparation for a game against another chess player takes a maximum of a few tens of minutes instead of one or up to several days as it did in the past. This part of the course is prepared in Chess Assistant version 20 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions. In this part of the course I will show you how to use the Chess Assistant program to effectively prepare for a game against another chess player. Let's start with... Prepare Against... Select the function Prepare for your opponent... in the toolbar. A new window appears that lists the players whose games appear in your database, in that case -> Hugebase. You can scroll through the list of players until you reach the name of your opponent or, better yet, use the search function. In field named Find: type in the name of your opponent, in this case: Gazis Efstathios. In this example, we assume that we are interested in preparing to play white against Gazis Efstathios. So, in the Your side: select White and check the Build classifier with ECO statistic box. If we are interested in a report with data from selected years, we select the Dates square and set the specific years from - to. Mark the row with the name Gazie Efstathios (in my database with the number 121117). Okay. Let's click on the Run button. After a short wait (about 3 seconds on my computer), Chess Assistant will show a branch named Gazis Efstathios (GRE)_1 (196) in the left-hand panel. The List branch (196) contains 196 chess games that our opponent played with black. If you wish, you can open any of that game. I chose the chess game (nb.196) Barchuk I. vs Gazis E. Double-click on this game to open it. Let's return to the window with game List (196); close this window. At this stage of preparation, it is useful to create an opening tree for all (196) of our opponent's games. To do this, click on the icon representing the Tree and select Current base. A new branch will be created in the left-hand panel named Tree (196/196). Easily and quickly - given the information in the column called % Year ELO - we can gain knowledge of which of white's first moves gave them the best results. In our example we can see that 1. Nf3 (47% wins) and 1. e4 and 1. d4 (45% wins each) are the openings giving the best results for white against our opponent. It's worth noting that 1. Nf3 was played by white only 16 times against Gazis E., while the openings 1. e4 and 1. d4 are much more often chosen - 91 and 69 times respectively -> and these lines are worth paying attention to, as they will give us much more useful information. This tree can be viewed by moving the pieces on the chessboard or by clicking on the move table. In the Gazis Efstathios (GRE)_Black branch there are lines of play in black of our opponent. There are lines of play with black that our opponent "dislikes" because he has achieved poor results in them... How to interpret this data ? Let's take the first line as an example: 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nd2 c5 4. Ngf3 cd +1=1-3 (30%) Our future opponent scored 1 win, 1 draw and 3 losses here. Which gave a poor result of 30%. We can check out the games in this line. First click on this line to select it, and then double-click on 4.Ngf3 (dislikes). In the newly opened window we can check the scores and opponents of Gazis E. ...and lines of play with black that our opponent "likes" because he has achieved good results in them. We interpret the results in the same way as above. Of course, when preparing an opponent I do not recommend choosing lines in which he has had convincing victories and good results. Such a line is e.g. 1.c4 g6, where Gazis E. won 3 times, tied once, and didn't lose a single chess game, achieving a result of 87%. The exception is when we have a very strong continuation prepared, which we are confident enough to play successfully. And in the branch named ECO_Gazis Efstathios (GRE)_Black similarly as in the previous branch - there are TOP lines with distribution by ECO codes of the openings. Again, similar to the above - by clicking on an opening such as E39, Chess Assistant shows in the right window more detailed data with the number of games played and the results included. Let's prepare a surprise for our future opponent in a line he has chosen in recent years and in which he may want to improve his results. We will focus on the Nimzo-Indian. In this opening, Gazis E. was moderately successful: +2=1-3 (41%). Let's double-click on E39 in the window on the right. Chess Assistant showed only 2 games, but it is noteworthy that until white's sixth move the chess game was played with the same moves. In the game in which our future opponent achieved the only positive result - a draw - after white's sixth move he played a black castling (0-0). In high probability, Gazis E. will play castling again in this opening. So let's prepare a surprise for our future opponent in white's seventh move. Let's open the first game by double clicking on it. On the additional toolbar, let's select Position and click on the icon: Report for current position (chessboard icon with question mark in red color). The first report shows that the move 7.a3 is interesting and can lead to a good game for white. Now on the additional toolbar, select Games and click on the icon: Find novelty. In the newly opened small window confirm by clicking OK. Select the row with the openings: Openings (on my computer: C:\Chess Assistant 20\Bases\Openings) and click OK. Chess Assistant will show the notation with novelty found move 7.a3N, chess games lines and additional annotations. At this point in our deliberations, after white's move 7. a3 - you can start a strong chess engine to see what it has to offer. How to effectively use chess engines in Chess Assistant will be described in the next part of this course "Chess Assistant - Using chess engines" Returning to the tree created earlier (Tree branch in the panel on the left of the window), we see that such a position was created only once in Gazis E.'s career, and 7.Bf4 was played; the game ended in a draw. By clicking on the Create Opening Table icon (icon marked with a red line) Chess Assistant will build an opening table starting with move number seven. In Opening table mode you will find the ability to play variants from the table, analyze them, mark interesting items that you can find in the variants and annotate them. In this mode you can navigate between several items while continuing your work. Concluding this part, here is the position after making the last move with white from the line suggested by Chess Assistant. Certainly an interesting picture on the chessboard, a sharpened game with a slight white advantage. In Chess Assistant after just a few clicks - we can get a lot of information that will serve us to prepare for the opponent. This is the end of the course: Chess Assistant - Preparing for an opponent I invite you to choose the next course :-))

Chess databases are essentially tools for working with lots of data. Chess Assistant is essentially a tool for storing, organizing, analyzing, sharing, chunking, ..., etc. data - that is, chess games in many different ways. This part of the course is prepared in Chess Assistant version 20 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions. I'll show you how to organize your work and access to data in Chess Assistant well. Let's start with... After launching, Chess Assistant welcomes us with a panel with open databases (on the left side of the screen) and a window named Games with a list of chess games (on the right side). Click to enlarge (works with any image) To switch from one view to another, you can make a change by selecting Window on the toolbar and clicking on one of the available options. For example, when you click Tile, the view will look like this: By selecting Tools from the toolbar and then View options... A new window will open: Among the very many possible options, we can, for example, change the appearance of the chessboard or enable the Game progress window, etc. After clicking on the OK button, we will see the changes effect. According to information in the Chess Assistant help file: The Game progress section in the bottom part of the window presents a graph that shows the changing evaluation, allowing one to easily locate blunders. When we click on a move in the graph, it will appear on the chessboard and the tree will switch to this position. The cursor in notation will also jump to this move. After clicking on the button located in the upper right corner of the chessboard: More personalization options are appearing (Enlarge board, Shrink board, Pieces, etc.) The Chess Assistant main screen can be customized to your preference by choosing from a variety of options. Create a new database Go to the toolbar and click Base - New... In the file window that appears, select the directory in which the database will rest, give it a name, and then press create new. A new window named Create new base will appear. Especially if you will be using multiple chess databases, you will probably want to give the chess databases an adequate comment. To do this, you can write your text in comment field. By default, Chess Assistant takes the library from the last base you worked with. To copy a library from another base, click Browse and select a base in the Select base dialog box. To clear the selection and create a new library, select Clear. If you want to create a new database in CA 5 (Chess Assistant 5) format, select the appropriate check box. When finished, press Finish and the name of the new base will appear in the object bar. When creating a new chess database, we can choose the format in which this new chess database will be created. The default Chess Assistant database format is *.CDP. I recommend this format for creating and using chess databases because it allows the fastest work while maintaining optimal size. Other chess database formats used are: *.PGN (Portable Game Notation) is a non-proprietary database format that is used by almost all chess applications. *.EPD (Extended Position Description) describes a chess position. Folders The folders panel will always contain open / previously created chess databases. At the bottom of the folder tree is a newly created database named New Database The Folders panel can be hidden or shown by clicking on the icon Show panel with opened bases (marked with a red border) Open chess database. Clicking on the List icon -> displays a list of all the chess games in selected database (Hugebase). Some of these databases are small, but many are large. Some of them may even contain millions of games (Hugebase). If you want to open chess databases that are not in the Chess Assistant Panel, then select Base on the toolbar and click Open... To open a database, you can (like in windows explorer) highlight it (single click) and press the enter key. Delete a chess database To delete a chess database, go to Base on the toolbar and click Delete... In the new window called Select base to remove, choose the chess base and click on the Open button. When you click Yes, the selected database will be deleted. You can also add a quick board to view or play games from your selected database. In Games view, click on the button in the upper right corner of the window, select Mode and... After clicking on Split option... In the upper part of Chess Assistant you will see the Games window with the list of games of the selected base. In the window below - you will see a chessboard with the currently selected chess game in the Games window. By clicking on any game in the Games window, a chessboard with that game will be displayed. The games list window When you open the database, the Game window appears, a scrolling list of all the games in the database. When you first create the database, it will not contain any games. As you enter more and more games, the chess games database program - Chess Assistant - will become more and more useful. Each game has a number, and as you enter them, they will be numbered sequentially. You can see the names and ratings of each player. result, length, ECO codes, as well as the tournament name are also available. The Game window provides an opportunity to select fields to be displayed in the list. In Games view, click on the button in the upper right corner of the window and select This window's properties... In the newly opened window called Properties of Hugebase, List on the right is an area called Order of fields in list where you can select the fields and their order of display. In this example, I left the fields I want displayed in the Games window in the Selected area. After clicking on the OK button, the Game window looks as follows. If you need to sort the chess games in the Games window, in Games view, click on the button in the upper right corner of the window and select Tools - Sort... A new window will open in which you can select criteria for sorting chess games. In our example I've chosen the Annotators criterion. Confirm your choice by clicking OK to start the sorting process. On my computer, the sorting will complete after a few tens of seconds. Here's what the games window looks like: Below is an example of a selected annotated game between Galkin A. vs Volokitin A. Move game / games to another database You will certainly want to copy games from one database to another. The actions described here do not remove games from the first database (the one you are copying from). We make copies of the selected games and move them to a separate database. In this example, we want to copy three chess games from Hugebase to New Database. You can select a game in the window Games by clicking on row with game number. In this way, you can highlight one or many games with a clicks. In the image below, three chess games are selected. To copy chess games, click on one of the selected rows and drag it to the panel with the open database -> where you want to place the previously selected games. After releasing the left mouse button over the selected database, a message will appear: Confirm by clicking OK button. The previously selected three chess game was copied to the New Database. A chess game or multiple chess games can be copied between bases using drag-and-drop. Deleting games The way to delete chess games is to select them in the Games windows (row / rows click) and press delete ... or right click on one of selected game/s Game - Delete/Undelete Del. When you do this, you will see that the game(s) is still there, but with the letters in red. Chess Assistant knows that you may have pressed the delete key by mistake and therefore requires additional steps to physically remove the game from the database. To permanently remove the selected games, select Base - Operations - Remove deleted games. Removing doubles Open database containing duplicate chess games. Select Base - Operations - Search for duplicates... A window will appear where you have different options to choose / define from. By clicking on the Run process button, Chess Assistant will create datasets with the duplicates found. Opening a game To view the game, simply double-click on it or press enter after highlighting it. When you do this, the chess game will open in a new window. Playback of the game You can use the arrow keys or the buttons under the chessboard to view the chess game. Replay game automatically First, open the chess game and select View from the mini toolbar and then click on the icon called Animate game marked with a red border in the image below. You can stop the automatic replay game at any time by clicking on the Stop Animation icon. Playing through a game containing variations If the game includes variations and notes, it is possible to play the variations. When you are done playing a variation, you can easily return to the game. It is not uncommon for the players themselves to reveal their thoughts right there, explaining why they played the move they did or why a different move might have been better or worse. In the screen excerpt below, playing through the Galkin A. - Volokitin A. match, 2007, GM Andreikin Dmitry was the Annotator. After white's eighth move, as you can see, the game contains a variation at this point. We can continue the game by: pressing the right arrow on keyboard or explore the variation first by clicking the icon below the chessboard called Jump into variation It is worth noting, that the window that was named Main line (blue color) when viewing the main game notation, when exploring variations, this window changes its name to Variation (green color). Of course, at any time you can just return to upper level in notation by clicking to any move or using active variation icon: To browse the variations even more easily, I recommend going to the toolbar, selecting Tools and Options... On the General tab, under General display and edit option, find option: Show variations on right arrow. Select the check mark next to Show variations on right arrow. And confirm by clicking on the OK button. Now, while browsing a chess game using the right arrow key, before encountering a variation, Chess Assistant will open a line selection window. In this window, using the arrows on your keyboard you can easily: exit from that window (left arrow key) select a main line or variation (up/down arrow keys) and enter it (right arrow key). Tip... During exploring variation, no matter how deep into the sub-variation you will be, the up/down arrow key will take you to a higher level of the variation: Up key: move to the move before the variation Down key: move to the move after the variation. Backup your database This can be done in two ways: By right-clicking on the selected base and clicking on Pack... Or -> by going to the Base menu in the toolbar and selecting Pack... No matter which way you choose, the effect will be the same. In the newly opened window named Pack base, you can select compression options. By default, Chess Assistant does not have the Multimedia files option checked, because this type of data is by its nature already compressed and checking this option would make the whole process longer. After naming the archive in the Archive name field and specifying its location... ...click OK button. Yes, click that button. The archive creation process will be started. In this case, where I compressed a database of nearly 7 million chess games, the compression process took 7 minutes on my computer. After the backup was created, the chess database was placed in the previously specified location and is contained in a single .ZIP file. Checking the integrity of a database In very rare cases, files can become corrupted (storage failure, power surges). It is a good idea to first back up the database and after that check the integrity of the database. The integrity check will provide a report on the database and offer to correct any errors found. To check the integrity of a database: First, close the base you are going to test. Select Tools on the toolbar and click Test base (for CAWin bases only)... In the new window, we should select the database. In this example, I'll specify Hugebase and In the field What to do after test: -> select view test log. Click OK button. And here's the test result: Good news! Chess Assistant did not find any errors in the tested database. In case there are errors, I suggest to repeat the chess database integrity test, and in the step according to the window below - select recover all recoverable games from database. After clicking the OK button, Chess Assistant will: recover all the chess games that could save from the corrupted chess database and place them in a new database by the name and location specified in field Select database to put recovered data to:. Create and save your games To add a new game, select the base where you want to place the new game and click on the Add new game icon (marked with a red border). This will bring up on Bases panel a branch with New game. And a new chessboard where new moves and variations can be entered. Enter moves with single clicks. You can drag a pawn or figure to a destination, but Chess Assistant includes a heuristic that suggesting moves. The heuristic move assistant is responsible for suggesting plausible moves during game entry. It is the move input assistant and is itself a small, fast chess engine. Using it allows you to enter most moves with a single click of the mouse. In the position below, white is on the move 19. If you click on Rook g3 and hold down the left mouse button, after a moment Chess Assistant will mark with a black border the square h3, to which it proposes to move this white Rook. If you instead simply click on g3, Chess Assistant will move the Rook to h3. Going back to the notation in this chess game, the white Rook move was made to the h3 square, meaning the player chose the same move that the Chess Assistant suggests after only 1 second of "thinking". ( By the way, Rg3-h3 is one of the few correct moves in this position ) Correcting misplaced moves I wanted to play 2. f4... If you enter an incorrect move, don't be afraid. Simply click on the Delete last move icon (marked with a red border). The white pawn's move to square f3 has been removed. You can also go back and delete the wrong move in a different way. Select the Comments toolbar and click on the scissors icon marked with a red border. Select Delete following moves and confirm your selection by clicking OK. The wrong move has been removed. Track changes The Track changes option will appear in the open chess game view. This is a useful option that, when enabled, will allow Chess Assistant to track the changes made to a particular chess game. To activate this, click Edit - Track changes in the toolbar. And now, making any changes e.g. to a chess game notation - we can easily undo them by re-entering the Track changes option and choosing Undo changes. This works in a similar way as the CTRL+Z keyboard shortcut in some other programs for editing text, graphics, spreadsheets, and similar. I recommend enabling Track changes option always when working with chess games in Chess Assistant. Saving game When you are done entering your game or just ready to save your work, click on the Save current game icon. The chess game will be saved in the selected base. Edit Game Data It is worth noting that the newly saved game does not have any relevant information such as player names, result, game date, etc. To complete/enter this kind of information there is a box called Game header, located below the chessboard. To enter the players name, click on the box marked with a red border If the library is empty or doesn't contain the white player's name, click on Add button. And the Add to library window will appear. You can type in the player's Name, ELO, Chess title, Birthday, Sex and FIDE ID. Press Add or OK, and the entered player will appear in the Select from Players library of base window. If you don't want to define the current header field then press the Undefined button. According to the Chess Assistant help file - all of the header fields are optional, and you can leave all of them undefined. If you wish to correct a name in the list, then press the Edit button. You can also attach HugeBase library (by setting the corresponding flag in the Select from library Players of base window) and take the players' names from the HugeBase. Please do not forget to indicate the path to the Hugebase in Tools - Options - General. If you must change games, make sure they are in smaller databases or in a copy of a large database. If necessary, create a new database and move the games you want to change before making changes. Important... When you are editing a library item, you are editing it in all the games of the base. When the required player is present in the library list, click on his/her name and press OK. The Select from Players library of base window will be closed, and the white player's name will appear in the corresponding field of the Game header pane of the New game window. The values of other fields stored in the library (i.e. Site, Event, Annotator, and Source) can be filled in the same way. Place the cursor on the field, click on the gray button with dots, and select the library list. The header fields, whose values are not stored in the library, don't have the gray button on the right. Just type in the values for these fields (Result, ECO, Date, Round, Remark, White ELO, and Black ELO), or choose them from the drop-down list. Any entered value can be deleted with the help of the local menu. Layouts Chess Assistant allows you to shape the interface to best suit your individual needs. For example, you can change the size of the chess board, set the simultaneous view of the game list and the chessboard (Split view), etc. In order not to set your preferred layout each time, you can save it via the available option in the selected window. Below is a simple example about a database layout. After clicking on the button located in the upper right corner of the chessboard: Select option Save layout and click on Database. This way Chess Assistant will restore that layout when you open the list of games in Hugebase again. This is the end of the course: Chess Assistant - Efficient work with a chess database I invite you to choose the next course :-))

What can help a chess player more than quick access to key information that will help in every area of the chess art ? In short, an up-to-date database with chess games and software for its effective use. You will discover how to find exactly the chess games you want. This part of the course is prepared in Scid vs. PC version 4.22 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions 4.x. (Scid vs PC 4.0 was released in 2010). Thanks to the possibilities offered by Scid vs. PC you can find chess games with three duplicated pawns, four Queens, a pawn attack on h4 field in the dragon variant of Sicilian defense, and hundreds of positions with unusual endings - so called chess fortresses - from the last 5 years for chess players with rating over 2300 Elo. Is anything... limiting us in this search? Only our imagination. Let's start with... To begin with, I suggest opening a large database with at least several hundred thousand games. In this part of the course, I will be using Caissabase. From Caissabase website you can legally and for free download a database containing over 4 million chess games! (December 2021). In the tolbar click Search - General. In the newly opened window General Search, each field represents a different thematic set of criteria that can be used to search for chess games. Only those games that meet the criteria you specified will remain in the list of searched games. The remaining games will not be visible until you complete your search. Big Tips... You can download chess games from the Internet by adding them to an existing database; with careful and systematic maintenance, the search will be successful. The downside of this solution is the time-consuming nature of the process. You can also download ready packets of chess games from various websites and similarly to the above described method - add them to the existing database. The downside of this solution is the necessity to verify many (hundreds, thousands of) chess games for correctly entered data and correct them if necessary. This also makes this process very time consuming. From his own experience the author of this course once a year buys the chess games database he is interested in or updates it from a reliable source ( eg. ChessBase, ChessOk, Caissabase website, etc.) One of the key reasons for having access to a large, highly maintained chess database is the ability to effectively use all of the search criteria in Scid vs. PC. If the database is properly maintained and updated, you will be able to get reasonable results. Back to window with General Search. Here's what you'll find: The General Search looks for information stored in the chess game header (e.g., date, name) or in the game text. The name fields (White, Black, Event, Site, and Round) match any text. They are not case sensitive, and spaces are ignored. More precise matches can be obtained by using wildcards (? for 1 character, * for zero or more characters) - and enclosing the search in quotation marks. If you are looking for a specific chess player (or pair of opponents) as White or Black and it doesn't matter what color they played, select Ignore Colors. Searching for additional tags matches typical tags such as Annotator and PlyCount found in the game header, and is faster than searching for full text (see below). The Value field is optional. If the value starts with a digit, only exact matches are made, but otherwise the match looks for prefixes. A header search can be used to find any text in a game's PGN. You can enter up to three phrases that must appear in order to be matched. This search is very useful for finding game comments (such as losing on time or novelty), or sequences of moves (such as Bxh7+ and Kxh7). However, this is very slow because all games (that meet other criteria) must be decoded and scanned - so it's a good idea to limit these searches to speed things up. If an ECO code search is performed, games that do not have an ECO code assigned are ignored. Ok, so let's go ahead and search by setting many different criteria. Search Masterfully, example 1. We are interested in chess games that meet the following conditions: The rating is between 2400 and 2900 Elo. No ignore colors Date between 2015.01.01 to 2021.11.30 White wins or Draw. The chess game is at least 40 moves or a maximum of 99 moves. Game with ECO code Grunfeld Exchange -> ECO code D85 - D89 For your convenience, I have marked the criteria of interest to us in the appropriate fields. On my computer, a database consisting of 4,569,084 chess games was searched in 30 seconds. Scid vs. PC found 1110 chess games that met the above criteria. Let's copy the 1100 found chess games to clipbase to continue further search on the collection of already selected games. And let's change the base by clicking on clipbase. Now, on the toolbar, let's go to Search - Material/Pattern. A new window called Material Search will open. You can use the functions available here to find schemes / themes of the middle or endgame. You can specify minimum and maximum amounts of each type of material and patterns, such as black Rook on c3 or white pawn on c7. Many common and popular material and pattern settings are available by clicking on the Common Patterns button. Tip... The speed of searching by set or one of the default patterns can vary greatly and can be reduced by setting the constraints accordingly, for example, if you set the minimum number of moves to 15 for an ending, all games that end below 15 moves can be skipped. Search Masterfully, example 2. Let's continue our search from example 1 based on the 1110 chess games posted in clipbase. We are interested in chess games that contain a motif of white attacking the black King's position with the help of the white pawns g4 and h4, the white rook on h1. On the black side with the King defended by Bishop on g7 and supported by Rook on f8 and pawn on h5... ...and meet the following conditions: Structure showing white's attack on the king's wing. See picture above with the chessboard setup. Same colors Bishop. For your convenience, I have marked the criteria of interest to us in the appropriate tabs. After clicking Search, the search result gave 4 chess games. Search Masterfully, example 3. First, reset all filters from previous searching. We are interested in positions similar to those arising in the King's gambit after a short castling of the white King and with an attack of black pawns on f4 and g4. We are looking for a games in which black was victorious and made check-mate. In Material/Pattern window, I have marked the criteria of interest to us in the appropriate fields. Scid vs. PC found 599 chess games that met the above criteria. In the next step we will narrow our search. Let's copy the 599 found chess games to clipbase and change the base by clicking on clipbase. The last of the above search criteria, are chess games in which black won by giving checkmate to the opponent. In General Search window I have marked the criteria of interest to us in the appropriate fields. After clicking Search, the search result gave 15 chess games. Search Masterfully, example 4. In this example, we will use the useful Scid vs. PC function to search for chess games based on positions on the chessboard. First, in the Board window, you need to have a chess position by which you will search. When you enter Search - Current Board, a new window called Board Search will open. In this inconspicuous window, there is a powerful possibility to search for chess games in a very simple way. Board Search can be an important tool with which you can select interesting chess games from large databases that are useful in, for example, preparing for an opponent. We have several options to choose from, which as you can probably see - are described in the Board Search window. Please remember to select the chess database before starting the search, After clicking the Search button, we get in the Game List window a list of chess games found according to the position we searched for. If, on the other hand, we expand the search criteria by choosing, for example, the following - Pawns (same material, all pawns on same squares) We will receive many more chess games after the search is complete. Search Masterfully, example 5. Another powerful Scid vs. PC chess game search feature - using specific moves. Suppose we want to search for chess games in which black played Nh5 and white go to Rxh5. This is a relatively common chess theme when white attacks the king with a rook sacrifice. How to do it? From the toolbar, select Search - Moves. In the newly opened window named Moves Search, in the Moves field, type the sequence of chess moves that follows. To make the search effective, remember to check the appropriate option in the Side to move box - in this example, after the Nh5 Rxh5 moves you want black to be on the move - and check this option in Side to move. OK, when you click on the Search button, you get a lot of chess games ( 1097 ) that can inspire you to develop unique and winning plans to attack the black king. Search Masterfully, example 6 ?! Scid vs. PC version 4.22 released 2021-06-11 has another chess game search feature called Chess Query Language. It will probably be a unique and very powerful feature with which you can search for a wide variety more or less complex chess themes, motifs and chess positions. According to the information in the Scid vs. PC help file, it can be concluded that Chess Query Language is not yet finalized; there are bugs, memory "leaks", some error messages will be shown in the status bar. Because of this, searching for games using the Chess Query Language is not described in this part of the course. It is my great hope that In the future, if the developers of Scid vs. PC confirm in one of the next releases of this program that Chess Query Language is a completed feature, then the author of this course will publish at chessengeria.com a free update - describing in detail the operation and use of this very promising feature. Search Masterfully, example.... Examples of searching for chess games in Scid vs. PV program can be endlessly multiplied ! :-) Using Scid vs. PC and combining the various search methods described in the examples in this part of the course, you can achieve great results that can be helpful when preparing an opponent, developing your skills, preparing an interesting article on chess, etc. Using Scid vs. PC is not always easy, but it can be extremely effective and fruitful in results! This is the end of the course: Scid vs. PC - Search Masterfully I invite you to choose the next course :-))

Scid vs. PC allows you to use chess engine / engines when working with chess games. For any move or position you can call the engine, which will evaluate the position, suggest a good or interesting continuation, or analyze the chess game noting the good and weak moves, suggesting what to play. The longer the chess engine works, the more confident we can be in its evaluation. Scid vs. PC allows you to install multiple chess engines and use one or more of them simultaneously. This part of the course is prepared in Scid vs. PC version 4.22 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions 4.x. (Scid vs PC 4.0 was released in 2010). Depending on the version of Scid vs. PC you are using dear reader, your program includes one to several engines that are integrated into Scid vs. PC. The very good news is that... Some of the pre-built engines for eg. Stockfish plays with a Grandmaster strength that surpasses even the playing strength of a World Chess Champion! This means, that the results of position analysis and evaluation using the Stockfish engine will be objective and at a very, very high level. How to use chess engines with Scid vs. PC - that's what this part of the course is about. Let's start with... Chess engines already installed To see a list of installed chess engines: - go to Tools - Analysis Engines Click to enlarge (works with any image) As you can see, Scid vs. PC version 4.22, which I use, offers several pre-installed chess engines. Each of these engines plays with the power of a champion. Critter and especially Stockfish, are chess engines with playing strength far superior to the strongest humans. Install Chess Engine You can install any chess engine in Scid vs. PC that uses the: UCI (Universal Chess Interface) protocol Winboard/Xboard protcol Almost all modern, free and commercial chess engines support the UCI protocol. To install new chess engines, download them, and click New button on Analysis Engines window. A new window will open: Configure Engine. To properly add a chess engine to the Scid vs. PC program, the empty boxes: Name Command Directory Must be filled in. Let's fill them in ! I am going to add a chess engine called Komodo. First, let's fill in the first field named name by typing the name: Komodo 12 Next, click to Browse button and let's specify the location and file of the Komodo engine. Confirm your selection by clicking on the Open button. Very good! At this stage of adding the engine, the window called Configure Engine on my computer looks like this: The Directory field can be left filled in as Scid vs. PC did by default. If you have a problem with the first engine start I suggest you fill in the Directory field by clicking on the button marked with a red border in the image below. After that, as we can see, Scid vs. PC filled in the Directory field after clicking on the indicated button. Fields Parameters Webpage Elo Can be left blank. If an engine needs additional parameters for startup (e.g. a specific opening book) they can be specified in the Parameters field. Please refer to the engines documentation. I will fill in the Webpage and Elo fields. The Komodo 12 engine, or more precisely Komodo 12.1.1, is a very powerful chess engine that plays with similar or even slightly higher playing strength than Stockfish 9. Scid vs. PC by default suggests using a chess engine communication protocol called UCI, since the vast majority of engines can communicate using this protocol. If you would like to add a chess engine released in, say, the early 2000s, then there is a good chance that such an engine will only communicate using the Xboard / Winboard protocol. If you're going to do a more detailed configuration of the engine, clicking on the Configure button will open a new window where you can make changes - I refer you to the engine developer's website (in this case https://komodochess.com) for details. A useful feature in the Scid vs. PC program is the ability to assign a so-called Hot Key to a selected chess engine. For example if you set Hot Key to F4 then after pressing F4 the selected chess engine will be started. In this final step of adding an engine, all required fields have been completed. After clicking the OK button, the chess engine will be installed. Once the chess engine has been installed correctly, it will be visible in the list of available engines. You can now start any engine in the list by double-clicking on it. But, let's do this after the Analysis Engines window is closed, so that we can check the engine's operation in a more readable way. Let's check the operation of the Komodo 12 chess engine - press F4 . Oh yes, it works ! Now let's try Stockfish. A free chess engine called Stockfish, which comes with Scid vs. PC, provides perfect integration with all Scid vs. PC options and capabilities. The latest version can be downloaded from the official website. (it is developed by Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Gary Linscott, Tord Romstad, Stéphane Nicolet, Stefan Geschwentner, and Joost VandeVondele, with many contributions from a community of open-source developers.). Stockfish 9 chess playing power has been measured at the sky-high level of 3363 Elo points (rapid time control). By comparison, the playing strength of World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen in December 2021 was 2842 Elo points (rapid time control), which is 521 Elo points less than the Stockfish 9 chess engine ! Click on this link - if you want to learn more about the Elo ranking system. Working with chess engine / engines As you may have guessed, working with chess engine-who can play chess with a strength far superior to that of any human player - produces very good results. And this is indeed the case. With a game board, open the any chess engine: For example, press F2 to start Stockfish 9. You can add several different chess engines if you wish. For example, let's add a second engine Komodo 12. As we can see, two chess engines ( Komodo 12 and Stockfish 9 ) simultaneously analyze the initial position of a chess game. If you have more than one chess engine running, you can remove the last one loaded with by right-clicking on the chess engine name tab and selecting Close. The more chess engines you add, the more impact it will have on your computer's resources. In 1994 a set of chessboard positions was created to test the chess engines of the time. One of the positions was then briefly summarized by Mr. Bruce Moreland, who stated: "I don't think that anyone (chess engine) has ever solved this one." Here's that position: Fen notation: r2qk2r/ppp1b1pp/2n1p3/3pP1n1/3P2b1/2PB1NN1/PP4PP/R1BQK2R w - - 0 1 I will show you how powerful is modern chess engine.... Let's start Stockfish 9 :-) After... 4 seconds I get result: Just 4 seconds after running Stockfish 9, we got the result of the analysis - the strongest move Nxg5 in that position was found. After adding the next two top lines of analysis, we see that the Nxg5 move is by far the strongest continuation. To increase or decrease the number of lines to be examined by chess engine, click on the line counter. Twenty-five years after this position was published, the unsolvable task was solved in... 4 seconds ! I would like to emphasize that the quality of position and game analysis by chess engines has increased incredibly over the last quarter of a century. It is worth using the suggestions of modern chess engines like Stockfish or Komodo, as they are able to quickly, efficiently and accurately offer any chess player objective and accurate suggestions, continuation plans, finding errors and inaccuracies or analysis of chess games. Understanding the result of chess engines work As you may remember, in the content of this course above - I opened Stockfish 9 to analyze a position that 25 years had been considered unsolvable for chess engines. Let's recall what was shown. The result of Stockfish 9's work was revealed in a window called: Stockfish 9 64 and included: Position evaluation in depth 32: +2.08 Search depth: 32 Best move analyzed: Nxg5 The number of positions checked per second: 12880 kn/s Continuation of moves after the best found move: 1.Nxg5 Bxd1 2.Nxe6 Qc8 3.Nxg7+ etc. Detailed description from the Scid vs. PC help file - this is what the engine window displays: Chess engines evaluate positions with the help of a numeric value. The evaluation is expressed in pawn units, always from the point of view of White. Piece Value in pawn units Pawn 1.0 Knight 3.0 Bishop 3.0 Rook 5.0 Queen 9.0 If the program is displaying a value of +1.30, this means that it considers the white position to be better by the equivalent of 1.3 pawns. If White is actually a pawn up, then the additional 0.3 is the result of positional considerations (mobility, deployment of pieces, king safety, pawn structure, etc.). A display of –3.00 means that White is a piece down – either a bishop or a knight, which are both equivalent to about three pawns. Rooks are worth five and the queen about nine pawns. Of course the king's value is unlimited – lose it and you've lost the game. Always it is the case: positive values favour White, negative values favour Black. In addition to the precise pawn values, the evaluation is also given in standard chess symbols: To show how chess engine "thinks" when it analyzes a position, let's use the setting on the board according to the image below. Fen notation: r2qk2r/ppp1b1pp/2n1p3/3pP1N1/3P4/2PB2N1/PP4PP/R1BbK2R w KQkq - 0 2 7 [-0.86] 2.Nxe6 Qc8 3.Nxg7+ Kf7 4.Rf1+ Kxg7 5.Nf5+ Qxf5 6.Bxf5 Bh5 (0.00) 2.Nxe6 Qb8 3.Nxg7+ Kf8 4.Ne6+ Kf7 5.Nf4 Bg4 6.Nxd5 Ke8 7.0-0 Rf8 8.Rxf8+ Kxf8 9.Bxh7 Be6 10.Nf4 Black is better 11 [+0.00] 2.Nxe6 Qc8 3.Bf5 Qb8 4.Nxg7+ Kf7 5.Bh6 Bf8 6.e6+ Kf6 7.h4 Ke7 8.Bg5+ Kd6 9.Bf4+ Ke7 10.Bg5+ (0.01) The position is equal 17 [+2.09] 2.Nxe6 Bg4 3.Nxd8 Nxd8 4.Be3 c5 5.dxc5 Nc6 6.Bd4 Rf8 7.Rf1 Rxf1+ 8.Nxf1 g6 9.Ne3 Be6 10.Ke2 Bd8 11.Rf1 Bc7 (0.02) White is clearly better It is worth noting, the change in engine evaluation of the position over time and with the increasing depth of the search for the best move and continuation. The longer chess engine analyzes and the deeper it searches, the more accurate his evaluation of the position becomes. Threat You can use chess engine to find the threat in any position. After open chess engine (do not lock it) and right-click the Trial mode icon Engine will now shift ahead a half ply and it start analyzing the position. The result is a list of the possible Threats in the position. There might well be more than one threat, and so make sure that the your chess engine is analyzing more than one line at a time. In our example, engine analyzes three lines. Variation board You can watch the positions of the chess engine analysis on the additional chess board. Click to chess board icon to Show analysis board. Below the analysis window a chessboard will be displayed on which the chess engine will indicate the strongest positions in a given chess position. Inserting analysis into notation You can insert the main line or all lines being analyzed directly into the game notation by clicking on the variation icons: +V or ++V. Example: After click +V icon - Add Variation The strongest variation will be inserted into the notation in the PGN window, The more lines at a time chess engine analyzes, the less accurate the result of the analysis will be than if chess engine analyzes only one line - I recommend especially such to correspondence chess players. The greater number of lines at once analyzed by chess engine allows for more insight into the chess player's evaluation of the position - I recommend this to chess players who want quick analysis results for several possible continuations - not necessarily the strongest. Tablebase There are a total of 64 pieces on the chessboard in the starting position. The total number of possible moves is so unimaginably large that chess will remain an unsolvable game for a very, very long time. But... during each game the number of pieces and pawns decreases with time due to the players' moves, and one by one they disappear from the chessboard. After a certain number of moves, it is not uncommon for the situation on the chessboard to go into the so-called endgame phase. In a situation where e.g. a few pieces remain on the board, is it possible to use solutions that will help chess engine to analyze chess positions even more accurately? Yes! The answer is Tablebase. For us Scid vs. PC users, it is important to know and take advantage of this knowledge that the cooperation between chess engine and Tablebase significantly increases chess engine ability to deliver accurate results in endgames. Chess engine using Tablebase will be even faster and more accurate - catching transitions to winning continuations in endgames, typically providing, for example, the exact line of the continuation and the number of moves to mate the opponent or achieve the desired draw. The concept of using a Tablebase is not new, so over the last few years with the development of computers and the increase in computing power, several Tablebases with different capabilities have emerged. Scid uses Nalimov tablebases, which are also used by many chess engines. The filenames often end with the suffix .nbw.emd or .nbb.emd (for Nalimov Bases White/Black). All 3, 4 and 5 piece Nalimov tablebases can be used in Scid vs. PC. In Scid vs. PC, after entering the Options - Tablebase Directory The Tablebases window opens. To load the tablebases, select their directory(s). Up to 4 directories may be selected. When a position found in a tablebase file is reached, the Game Information window (below the chessboard) will show the relevant information. If you are interested in the details between the different Tablebases, I recommend the excellent article on the ChessBase website; one example: a big advantage of the Syzygy Endgame Tablebases is that they are much smaller than others Tablebases. The 6-man Syzygy tablebases need 150 GB disc space, whereas the Nalimov tablebases need more than 1 TB. You can configure the amount of information shown via the Options - Game Information menus. Selecting Result and Best Moves gives the most information, but is often much slower than Result Only. Due to the size of the Tablebase, I recommend installing them outside the Documents folder, for example in D:\Nalimov Analysis chess game Scid vs. PC provides an Annotate option to automatically check chess game for errors and inaccuracies. This feature is useful for quick, automatic analysis your own unannotated games. For example, I always use it after I finish a tournament I've participated in. The stronger chess engine - the less time it takes for accurate tactical analysis Let Stockfish 9 analyze the game played between Rotlewi and Rubinstein in 1907. After opening the chess game and engine, click on the Annotate icon. In the newly opened window you can specify the parameters of chess game analysis or accept the default settings by clicking OK. The Annotate button is only shown in the first engine window. Move Control Whether to process each move for a fixed time, or fixed depth (UCI only). Depth per move Number of half-moves engine spends on analysing each move (UCI only). Seconds per move Number of seconds engine spends on analysing each move. Blunder Threshold A Score which determines whether it's a bad move or not, representing pawns (i.e. 0.5 means an evaluation drop of half a pawn). Cut Off Threshold Above this score, dont worry about adding variations, as game is won. Add Scores / Variations Choose When to add Scores and Variations. (Scores can then be utilized by the Score Graph) Missed / shorter mates. This adds all missed and shorter mates which are at least a few ply shorter of the 'Depth per move' setting (- at higher ply, the engine's PV aren't always reliable). Additionally, the added line may not be complete - ie. it may not end in mate. This is due to the engine reporting "Mate in n", but not actually giving the whole line/PV, which is a common UCI engine oddity. Which Side Select which side(s) should be annotated. Score format Select how single scores will be formatted. The square bracket options will hide comments in the PGN window if PGN->Options->Hide-Codes is selected. Add annotator tag Store engine name as an "Annotator" tag in the PGN header. Process variations Recursively process variations. Use book Moves that are contained in this opening book are skipped , and annotation starts after the book moves. Batch annotation Automatically process multiple games, saving them as we go. Opening errors only Only check for opening errors. (up to the move specified). Mark tactical exercises This can be used to generate exercises for the training function Find Best Move. (UCI only). After configuring the options and pressing OK, Autoplay Mode is enabled, tree updating is disabled, and the engine starts its analysis. A variation and/or score is automatically added for each position as the engine processes the game. Only positions from the current one until the end of the game are annotated, so you can skip annotation of opening moves by moving to a mid-game position before starting. Pressing the Annotate Button a second time cancels annotation. Let's look at the result Analysis chess game between Rotlewi Georg vs Rubinstein Akiba. As we can see in the Scid vs. PC program, we get analysis chess game including annotations, inaccuracies and errors found and indications of stronger continuations and comments. Also we get overall summary at the end of the notation. This is the end of the course: Scid vs. PC - Using chess engines I invite you to choose the next course :-))

I mostly play chess online. This is a convenient and quick way to participate in a chess tournament or to spend time with a friend chatting and playing chess in a suitable online location. The database of my chess games currently contains over 3000 games and is an excellent material for analysis and consideration aimed at improving the quality of my chess play. There is no point in making mistakes if we are not going to learn from them. This part of the course is prepared in Scid vs. PC version 4.22 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions 4.x. (Scid vs PC 4.0 was released in 2010). How to do annotations - that's what this part of the course is about. Let's start with... Annotating game When reviewing a completed chess game or when entering moves, Scid vs. PC allows you to add explanations to variants, comments, move ratings (!, !!, ?, ?!, etc.) and positions (+-, ±, -+, =, etc.). Click to enlarge (works with any image) In toolbar select Windows, then click Comment Editor. A palette of different symbols will be displayed. Using the Comment Editor, you can select and add the appropriate symbol for your chess game notation. You can also recall these symbols by right-clicking on the move and selecting Comment Editor. After adding the ?! symbol to black's thirteenth move and click Apply button, the notation looks like this: Adding text commentary and variations To enter a variation, select Edit on the toolbar and click Add Variation... Or you can click +V icon. When you are finished entering a variation, you can click on any field notation (or outside the variation). Excellent! Here is the new variation ( 13...Kh8 14.Bxf5 b5 ) after its entry: To add a text comment, in the Comment Editor window, below the symbol field is a field where you can enter a text comment. After typing the comment and clicking Apply button, we should get the following notation: Comments may also exist at the start of a game or variation. To add a comment prefixing a variation go to the variation's first move; then move back one move before entering the comment. In addition to text comments, Scid can also draw colour symbols and arrows on the board. These can be drawn straight onto the main board, or more detailed drawings can be made in the Comment Editor by pressing icon: to show/hide a small board and diagram: Arrows can be drawn in two ways - In the Main Board, hold Control then click on the start square and then end square. Or in the Comment Editor, arrows can be drawn (and erased) by dragging between two squares. The arrow width and length can be altered in the Comment Editor. Colouring Squares Similarly, hold Shift and click on the main board to colour a square, or click on any square in the Comment Editor board to add the selected colour/mark. The comments associated with these diagrams are visible as special % codes in the PGN window, but can be hidden by selecting "Hide Square/Arrow Codes" in the PGN window Options. Deleting variation. After right-clicking a variation with 18,,,c5 choose Delete Variation. A variation of move eighteen has been removed from the notation. Promoting variation. When you click on the variation and select Promote Variation, the selected variation will be moved up one step in the chess notation of that chess game. After promoting the variation, the notation looks exactly like this: Insert diagram It is possible to insert a diagram into the chess notation for each selected move. In the commented chess game in this case, after black's move 13...f4 we will insert a chess diagram. Click on the move 13...f4 in the PGN window. In the Comment Editor window, click on the letter D The inserted diagram will not be visible in the PGN window. The inserted diagram will be visible when you export the chess game to an HTML file or to an HTML and JavaScript file. To do this, select Tools - Export Current Game - Export Game to HTML from the toolbar After opening the file, in the newly inserted diagram we see the position created after black's thirteenth move 13...f4. If you want to delete all comments from PGN window, you need to select Edit - Strip - Comments from the toolbar. After that, the notation looks like this: Insert novelties. You can label yourself a move that you think is novelty-critical in the opening. For example, I will mark the move 9...Rb8 as a novelty. To do so, click on the move of your choice (in this case 9...Rb8) and in the Comment Editor window select N. Then, after confirming with Apply button, the entry in the PGN window looks like this: Using Scid vs. PC we can add annotations to chess games in many different ways described above in the course content. This is to make the annotations on chess games as clear and attractive as possible, and to help understand the moves made and the flow of the chess games played. This is the end of the course: Scid vs. PC - Annotating games I invite you to choose the next course :-))