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.

“Full analysis” mode in Fritz12 and Rybka4

In the last blog post we mentioned the most useful feature of your chess software program(s), one which tabletop and handheld standalone chess computers lack: the ability to analyze complete games. Today we’re going to start exploring these game analysis features, specifically the ones in the Fritz12 interface (also shared by the ChessBase versions of Rybka4, Hiarcs13, Shredder12, and Junior12).

The most important feature of your chess playing software

I still own my first chess computer, a tabletop model I bought in 1989. It had plenty of levels, but at that time even the low levels were able to kick my butt. Despite my lack of success in defeating the danged device, I became fascinated by chess computers – within a year I owned three tabletop models and a portable “peg” style model.

Using transposition tables in Fritz & Rybka

Another way to “speed up” your chess engine (Fritz, Rybka, Hiarcs, Junior, or Shredder) is through the use of transposition tables, also known as hash tables. Proper use of these tables doesn’t actually make your chess engine analyze any faster (it’ll still evaluate the same number of positions per second), but you will get deeper searches in the time you allot to the analysis, because transposition tables ensure that the engine won’t waste time by re-evaluating board positions which have already been evaluated earlier in the search.

Making your chess analysis engine stronger

I’ve spent the last few blog posts writing about chess engines (chessplaying computer programs), and it’s for a reason – this is all headed somewhere. We’re going to be looking at using a chess engine for chess training and analysis, not just in the native Fritz12 and Rybka4 interfaces, but also in ChessBase 11. But before we go there, we need to look at a couple of important (and only slightly technical) details of which you should be aware.

Understanding chess engine evaluations

Coming up in the near future we’ll be using this blog to discuss chess engine functions in ChessBase 11, Fritz12, Rybka4, etc. But before we jump into detailed explanations of these functions, it’s a good idea to take the time to review some of the basic concepts and visual displays relating to chessplaying programs in ChessBase software.

For the novice: training games with Fritz/Rybka

As a continuation of my last blog post (in which we learned about a fairly weak chess engine called Turing), I’m going to offer some suggestions for new chessplayers who might be finding the Fritz12 and Rybka4 chess engines a bit too strong for them.

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).