Color coding chess variations in ChessBase 11

In the last couple of blog posts, we examined a number of different ChessBase 11 toggles which allow you to avoid the dreaded “wall of text” effect when you are reviewing a game containing multiple variations occurring at a single branching point:

Changing the position of variations in ChessBase 11

In Tuesday’s post we learned how to change the appearance of variations in ChessBase 11. You’ll recall that we ended up with the following display in the Notation pane:

ChessBase 11 game notation displays

Many of us as chessplayers own extensive personal chess libraries (I’ve met few players who didn’t) and we often find ourselves manually inputting games and analysis from our books and magazines into ChessBase 11. There’s a host of reasons for doing so: finding positions in an opening tree for statistical analysis, searching out games with the same position as the final position from an analysis line, running Fritz, Rybka, or another chess engine on those final analysis positions (or on a whole game).

ChessBase “how to” videos

It’s been an unusual couple of days around my home office. I was going to record a few videos yesterday (to get ahead of the work) when my phone suddenly went nuts – I was answering ChessBase and Fritz questions on and off all day long (which is a good thing, other than the fact that I didn’t get a single video recorded).

A great ChessBase 11 keyboard shortcut

Nearly every user of ChessBase 11 will, at some point, wind up entering games by hand (and probably annotating them as well). In fact, a majority of users immediately create databases of their own tournament and casual games once they find their way around the software.

Opening ChessBase-format chess eBooks using Fritz12

My friend Will at USCFSales has been getting hit with this question a fair little bit lately: “I just bought a ChessBase-format eBook from USCFSales. How do I open and read it using Fritz12?” So I’ve decided to write it up today to hopefully clarify this point for our customers.

More ChessBase 11 opening book options

Today we’ll take a look at a couple of additional (and useful!) opening book options which you can toggle “on” or “off” in ChessBase 11.

ChessBase opening tree statistics

In our last blog post, we saw how to get extended opening statistics from a ChessBase 11 tree. Today we’ll look at the numbers themselves, as well as an additional (and very useful) statistical display.