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.

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”.

Fritz13 – The “Let’s Check” LiveBook

There are quite a few unique aspects to the new Fritz13 chess program’s “Let’s Check” features, all of which center on an online server to which the worldwide community of users are contributing analysis around the clock. One of the “Let’s Check” features is an opening book which is being constantly updated by new analysis, one which every Fritz13 owner can access as the opening book used by our own chess engines (Fritz13 or any other compatible chessplaying program) when we play against them.

Fritz13 chess software – Contributing an engine to “Let’s Check”

In last week’s post we learned how to submit positions for analysis to the worldwide community of Fritz13 users. Each time you submit a position, it costs you a credit – which obviously leads to a followup question: how do you earn more credits? That’s the question we’ll answer today…

Fritz13’s “Let’s Check” – Submitting a position for analysis

Every player has run into knotty chess positions from time to time. I recall a variation from the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings that used to baffle me; the evaluation said that White had a “won” game, but I just couldn’t find it. I remember sitting in a local pub with the position set up on an analysis set, just staring at the board for so long that the barmaid thought I’d passed out or fallen asleep with my chin on my chest; a couple of my chessplaying friends soon showed up and we had a lively debate about the merits of the position.

One of the benefits of today’s chessplaying computer software, like Fritz13 from USCFSales.com, is that you can use the chess engine to analyze any position anytime you choose. And the plethora of available engines allows you to get multiple “opinions” and evaluations. But analysis by multiple engines takes time, though, which is why the Fritz13 “Let’s Check” distributed computing features are so revolutionary – many, many players are ausing a variety of chess engines to analyze positions and are then storing those analyses on a central server, accessible by other Fritz13 users in mere seconds.

Chess game analysis using Fritz13’s “Let’s Check”

We learned about “discovering a position”, a basic feature of Fritz13’s “Let’s Check” analysis system in the last blog post. This time around in USCFSales’ blog we’ll tackle another “Let’s Check” feature: analysis of complete games.

Fritz13 chess software – “Discovering” positions

As fast as modern PC hardware can operate, there are still some jobs which are just too big for one machine to handle. That’s a basic idea behind distributed computing: dividing a large computational task between multiple machines. Another basic idea concerns the avoidance of repetition: why have a computer repeat a task that another computer has already completed? Both of these ideas are the core concepts behind the new “Let’s Check” features found in the Fritz13 chess playing and analysis program from USCFSales.

New Fritz13 chess playing and analysis software

Fritz13 is here! The long-awaited chess playing and chess analysis software is at USCFSales right now. The program includes the new Fritz13 engine, plus exciting new features to enhance your chess analysis experience.

“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.

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.

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.