A sacrificial chess engine

The first order of business today is an apology, as the next article on chess analysis is going to be delayed until Friday or next Tuesday. I’m sorry, but I’ll continue with the next part of that series as soon as possible. However, I will give you a quick heads-up about something really cool:

Comparing analysis modes in Fritz/Rybka chess software

In the previous blog post we mentioned the question, “What are the best analysis settings for the Fritz family of chess playing programs?” (said programs being Fritz, Hiarcs, Junior, Rybka, and Shredder). Today we’ll consider the answer to that question.

Some interesting analysis output from Fritz/Rybka chess software

We’ve looked at a lot of information over the last few posts to this blog, so we’re going to take a short pause today and catch our collective breath a little bit before proceeding. Admittedly I did cover things a little backward in those past posts, as I’d first received numerous requests for information on the analysis features of the Fritz “family” of chess playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Junior, Hiarcs, and Shredder). Partway through that short series of blog posts, I began to receive requests on game input (how to add your personal games to a database). So that’s why we discussed analysis first and game input second.

“Cutting and pasting” games into Fritz/Rybka

In the last few posts to this blog we’ve considered several ways to get games into a “Fritz family” (Fritz, Shredder, Hiarcs, Junior, Rybka) database, but there’s a major source of games we’ve not yet discussed.

Manual input of games into Fritz/Rybka

If you’ve been playing chess any length of time, you have gobs of old scoresheets lying around, maybe whole books of them. You’d love to be able to input these games into the Fritz family of playing programs (Fritz, Hiarcs, Junior, Shredder, and Rybka) to have a chess engine analyze them, but you don’t know how to do it.

Guess what today’s topic is going to be?

Importing PGN games into the Fritz/Rybka interface

There’s one more topic we need to cover before we discuss how to use the analysis features in the Fritz family of playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Hiarcs, Shredder, and Junior) to actually improve our play: how do we get games other than ones we’ve played against the computer into a database for analysis?

Fritz/Rybka analysis – the importance of endgame tablebases

In discussing post-game analysis in the Fritz “family” of playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Shredder, Junior, and Hiarcs), as we’ve been doing for the last several blog posts, we need to also consider the important role of endgame tablebases (such as we find in the Fritz Endgame Turbo 3 package).

Post-analysis evaluation profiles in Fritz/Rybka

In Tuesday’s post, I hinted at today’s subject for this blog: using the evaluation profile after a game analysis in the Fritz “family” of chess playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Junior, Hiarcs, & Shredder). Back in the day, the only way to generate an evaluation profile was by playing a game against a chess engine. But somewhere along the way (I’m not sure of the exact version), a feature was added which allows you to create a modified evaluation profile by running a “blundercheck” game analysis. This later form of evaluation profile is what we’re going to look at today.

“Blundercheck” analysis mode in Fritz/Rybka

Last time around we learned how to analyze a chess game using the “Full analysis” mode in Fritz and its related playing programs (Rybka, Hiarcs, Junior, & Shredder). “Full analysis” is a decent tool for chessplayers (especially beginners) who don’t want to be overwhelmed by long, and sometimes complex, variations and who would rather have verbal cues and symbolic notation instead of numeric evaluations. But for players who are a bit more advanced and aren’t afraid of numbers, there’s another analysis mode available. “Blundercheck” provides precise numerical evaluations – you’ll not only see that the chess engine’s suggested variation is better than what was actually played, you’ll see exactly how much better.