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.

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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”.

How to use the chess Mega Database with ChessBase and Fritz

The new Mega Database 2012 for ChessBase 11 and the Fritz family of playing programs (Fritz, Hiarcs, Junior, Shredder, and Rybka) is here! The ChessBase company updates their master database annually to include new games played over the previous year, as well as to add historical games which have recently been unearthed. The latest version of the database contains 5,154,657 games (an increase of 357,739 games over the 2011 version), as well as 700 tournament crosstables and reports, and an updated Player Encyclopedia for use in ChessBase 11. Among Mega Database 2012’s treasures are more than 78,000 games annotated by titled players.

Over the years, I’ve sometimes heard players say, “Why do I need millions of games? I’ll never play through all of them anyway!” Gee, I don’t know – why do you need a local library? You’re never going to read all of those books. Comments like these illustrate vividly that the point has been missed. A database of five million games (or any chess database of any size, for that matter) is just like a library – you’ll never use everything that’s in it, but what you will use is there for you whenever you want it. Let me show you what I mean with a simple chess example…

Installing Fritz Powerbook 2012 chess software

Fritz Powerbook 2012 provides users of the Fritz family of chess playing programs (Fritz 13, Rybka 4, Junior 12, Hiarcs 13, and Shredder 12) with a broader range of openings than the books which come with those programs. The individual books which ship with the programs are “tuned” to maximize the strengths of a chess engine (favoring open, tactical positions, and steering away from closed positions whenever possible); on the other hand, Powerbook 2012 is based on a compilation of games played between humans, with no artificial “tuning” – therefore Fritz Powerbook users will see their chess playing engines go into lines (such as closed games or speculative gambits) that are usually avoided when the engine’s regular opening book is used.

“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.