The “Control” board in the Fritz 13 chess program

Today’s blog post shouldn’t be any kind of major revelatory experience for users of the Fritz “family” of playing programs; it’s probably not going to make a huge impact on the way you use Fritz13 or any of its associated chess playing programs (Hiarcs, Junior, Shredder, or Rybka). But I’m going to show you a potentially useful feature if you’re a regular user of Fritz13’s 3D chess boards.

Removing variations from games using Fritz 13 chess software

We’ve looked at various types of chess engine analysis using Fritz13, including multiple-engine chess analysis in last week’s post, all of which are features in which the chess engine can add replayable variations to a database game. You can also add your own variations to games manually using Fritz13.

But once in a while you may want to remove some variations. For example, you’re annotating a game and have finished and saved a variation, when you suddenly realize that the variation doesn’t work. Or you’ve had three or four chessplaying engines analyze a game and you’d like to remove a few superfluous variations from the gamescore.

The “Compare” chess analysis function in Fritz 13

We’ve already discussed the “Full analysis” and “Blundercheck” analysis functions in the Fritz family of playing programs (Fritz 13, Junior 12, Hiarcs 13, Shredder 12, and Rybka 4). But there’s a third method of analyzing games which we’ve not yet considered. I recently saw a comment in which a user appeared concerned that Fritz only pointed out a user’s errors, and didn’t provide an “attaboy!” for good moves in the analysis modes which we’ve previously explored. My response to that concern is that the “attaboys” are implicit rather than explicit; if Fritz isn’t criticizing a move, then it’s safe to assume that the move was sufficient (at least relatively, given the “Threshold” parameter that’s used in the game’s analysis).

But there is a way to get Fritz’s opinion on every move in a game, as well as to have multiple engines analyze a game in one go. It’s called “Compare analysis”, and it’s the topic of today’s uscfsales.com blog post.

Fritz13’s “chess dashboard”: the Measurements display

Happy St. Valentine’s Day! While we’re on the subject of that holiday, uscfsales.com is having a special sale to celebrate – I’ll give you the details later in this post. But first we’re going to look at a feature from the Fritz “family” of chess playing programs (Fritz 13, Shredder 12, Junior 12, Hiarcs 13, and Rybka 4), namely the “Measurements” pane. It’s a sort of “chess dashboard” which can provide some visual cues about the presence of important tactical or positional motifs in a given chess position.

Generating “threat” identifiers in the Fritz13 chess program

Over the years, I’ve occasionally seen this interesting question appear on chess message boards: “What’s a threat?” For the old chess grognards like myself, that seems like a pretty elementary question, one which we take for granted, but for newcomers to the game the answer may not be at all obvious or intuitive.

Think about it for a moment. How many times do you see the word “threat” (or its various derivations such as “threaten”) used in chess articles, tutorials, annotated games, etc.? As a chess term, it’s pretty ubiquitous, right? Even some of our treasured chess maxims contain the word, such as Nimzovich’s famous “The threat is often stronger than the execution”.

How to get Fritz13 to explain all the moves in a chess position

A typical chess position can contain a couple of dozen (or more!) legal moves, and a beginning player often can become overwhelmed by the possibilities, neither knowing nor understanding the point of a particular candidate move. Likewise, every chess player (regardless of their level of experience) should look at a move his or her opponent has made and always immediately ask, “Now why did he play that?”

It’s not always easy to understand the point of a particular move, whether one is a beginner or a grizzled veteran – heck, I’ve been playing for many years and I still often find myself wondering why a particular move was played. The Fritz family of playing programs (Fritz, Hiarcs, Junior, Shredder, and Rybka), chess playing software which is available from uscfsales.com, contains a feature which can help point you in the right direction when you’re trying to figure out the reason behind a particular move, a feature called (not surprisingly) “Explain all moves”.

“Deep position analysis” in the Fritz/Rybka chess playing program

If you haven’t yet read the immediately previous post to this blog, I encourage you to do so – otherwise the rest of this post might not make much sense. In that last post, we discussed the difference between the way an over the board (face to face) chessplayer analyzes a particular board position, and the way a correspondence player would analyze the same position. The over the board player must look at a static position, decide on two or three candidate moves, and try to mentally visualize the consequences of each candidate as far ahead as he can. That’s exactly how a chess program like one of the Fritz family (Fritz, Rybka, Hiarcs, Junior, and Shredder) analyzes a position in “Infinite analysis” mode. A correspondence player, however, is free to move pieces around, examine many, many candidate moves and, after deciding on one, move a piece physically and analyze that move, deciding on candidates, etc. (often by moving pieces without the necessity of “in the head” visualization) and record the moves/analysis as he sees fit. That’s similar to the style of computer analysis (which I call “creeping” analysis) which was discussed in the previous post: manually advancing the engine one move at a time, each time adding the top-evaluated candidate to a growing line of analysis.

“Creeping” chess analysis in Fritz/Rybka

In the previous blog post we examined a basic use for the “Infinite analysis” feature in the Fritz “family” of chess playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Hiarcs, Shredder, and Junior). This time around we’re going to learn another way to use this feature, a method which is a bit more time-intensive but which yields interesting results.

Infinite chess analysis mode in Fritz/Rybka

I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations lately with users of the Fritz “family” of playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Hiarcs, Junior, and Shredder) who weren’t quite sure what “Infinite analysis” does, or, in one case, what it can do for them. “Infinite analysis” has a lot of uses, all based on the idea that you feed a position to the chess engine and let it chew on the position to find the best sequence of play. It’s not terribly different from the way we human analyze when we’re playing a face-to-face game: we try to figure out the best move, followed by our opponents’ best reply, followed by what we’d do next, etc. – it’s the old “If I do this, he’ll do this, then I’ll do this…” thing. The difference is that a chess engine will look much farther ahead (“deeper”) than any human could do, as well as pick better moves than we average players would normally choose.

The Fritz/Rybka/etc. chess program’s shared user interface

I’ve recently received a few panicked phone calls and e-mails from new users of two or more of the Fritz family of playing programs (Fritz, Hiarcs, Rybka, Junior, and Shredder). “I just double-clicked on the Fritz12 icon and it launched Rybka4! How do I get my Fritz back???”

The fact of the matter is, your Fritz didn’t “go” anywhere. Both chessplaying engines share the same user interface – the “wrapper” containing the on-screen chessboard and all of the program’s various user commands.

Automatic multi-game replay in Fritz/Rybka

One of the first features of the Fritz family of chess playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Hiarcs, Junior, Shredder) learned by new users is how to manually replay database games by using the keyboard cursor keys or the on-screen VCR buttons. But more than a few folks don’t realize that they can load a database and have Fritz, etc. replay the games automatically, one game after the other, while they sit back and watch.

Post-game chess engine analysis: zeroing in

Although I’ve stressed in prior posts that a chess engine, such as one of the Fritz family of playing programs (e.g. Fritz, Rybka, Junior, Hiarcs, and Shredder) can best be used to point out chronic recurring problems in one’s chess play over the course of many games, you can also use a chess engine to zero in on a particular problem point in one of your recent games.

Fritz/Rybka’s post-game chess analysis: the small picture and the big picture

In continuing our examination of the post game chess analysis provided by the Fritz family of playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Hiarcs, Junior, and Shredder), I’m going to use an example from one of my own recent games to illustrate how these chess engines can simultaneously provide you with both specific and general information.

Interpreting Fritz/Rybka’s game analysis

We’ve been examining the process of post-game chess analysis using the Fritz “family” of playing programs (Fritz, Rybka, Junior, Hiarcs, and Shredder). As we’ve discussed previously, you can have a chess engine analyze every game you’ve ever played but unless you take a close look at that analysis and, most important of all, understand what that analysis is showing you, it’s just a waste of electricity. A chess engine can be a valuable tool for guiding your chess study, but only if you take the time to carefully look at its analysis of your games.

After Fritz analyzes your chess games, it’s your turn

After you’ve input your latest games and had one or more of the Fritz “family” of playing programs/chess engines (Fritz, Hiarcs, Junior, Shredder, Rybka) analyze them, what’s next?