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”.

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.

An index of uscfsales.com ChessBase and Fritz videos for 2010/2011

A poster to a chess message board recently requested a list of the subjects of my uscfsales.com ChessBase 11 and Fritz 12/Fritz 13 chess software instructional videos on our YouTube channel. After I reflected on that for a while, I agreed that it would be a good idea to create such an index to help our chess friends find the instructions they’re seeking. So here’s a list of my videos from late 2010 through the end of 2011, along with their topics and links to them.

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.