(Under jaymthetactician paremiters of Shredder, it says:)

I have desided to write my opinion of both these programs since i bought them both, i dident knew wich one to buy eather whenm i started playing chess :)

<Fritz 8 Review>

Fritz 8 is for the serius chessplayer.
The one thing about fritz that might scare someone of is that the manual is not very good, it covers only the most basic stuff, and fritz has so many options and features that it would almost require a leksikon to cover it all. So you must be willing to spend some time poking around with the program before you find the function you wich to use. On the other hand once you get used to the program you are going to love it, because it can almost do anything a chess player should ever need. The graphics in Fritz is ok, it looks like any other windows program and will multitask with all other standard windows aplications. After you install the program you wont need the CD’s again, if you install the database on your harddrive. There is some diferent chess boards and pieces, nothing fancy like Chessmaster, but anyway all we want is a good 2d board with some easy to recognize pieces.

Frits 8 has 3 playing modes

Friendly game is a mode where fritz 8 tryes to play at your level, it will learn from its mistakes when ever you play it and win, next time it will play a litle better to adjust its strengh close to yours for a fair game.

Sparring mode here fritz 8 plays at full strengh, but at some point it will make a tactical error allowing the human player to exploit it if he or her see it and then go on to win the game.

Normal mode, here fritz plays at full strengh, and it is quite strong. The engine it self is among the strongest chess engines in the world, and basicly no human being exept very few grandmasters will ever be able to beat , or draw it.

There is also two modes, Opening training where you can train specific openings, you can configure fritz to always play the same opening line if you want to train it. And also there is a endgame training where you can train endgames Rook vs bishop, pawn endgames or what what ever you want to get better at. These features are good and not missing anything, however they are not explaning so much in detail the moves as for example chessmaster does with its tutorials.

To be honest i havent played fritz much, as i use the program mostly for analys or online play, wich leads us on to the next section in the review.

The analys function.
Fritz offers 3 ways of analysing your game.

Analyse game where fritz analyse the whole game, you can chose betweeen a lot of parameters, like how deep it should search in variations, how many minutes to spend look in each move. If you want it to find and refer to similar positions in other games from your database, you can configure it to ask training questions, at critical positions it will hide the continuation of the game and ask you what is the best move here, before it shows the continuation. You can set up how precise you want the analys to be for example if you want it only to look for big tactical errors you set the pawn value to +1 or more (Frits will only examine variations where eather black or white could lose or capture a pawn or piece), or if you want it to look at really close strategic positions you set the pawn value to 0,25.

Blundercheck
Is mostly identical to full analys it shows some other info also, wich i will not go into detail here.

With fritz 8 comes also a very good Chessdatabase program

You get a database with more than 500.000 games you can study specific players, search for positions, openings and a lot of other things it is almost only you own imagination that limits how you can use this.

All the games you play with fritz, or online at playchess.com are automaticly stored in the database So you can analyse them at any given time you want, or search for positions, openings or what you want.

Also you can import new databases, games, opening books, for example from chessgames.com to keep your database updated or extending it to suit your needs.

<Playchess.com>

When you buy Fritz you also get 1 year free subscribtion to the playchess.com server. This alone is easely worth the money spend on fritz.

Playchess.com is a chessserver located in germany with thousands of chessplayers from the very beginners, to top grandmaster like Michael Adams, Nigel short, Nakamura, Radjabov, and many others. You will always find someone to play against no matter if you just learned hom the pieces move, or you are a Fide grandmaster. You can play single games or you can enter one of the many tournaments, join a simultation or what you like, it is all up to you.

The server has system operators online wich can help if you have questions, and also looking into people behave them self. Spam, harsh languages and other such things are not tolerated. They have a system to detect if someone is cheating, and if caught cheating the offender lose his rating, and if doing it again they will be banned from the server.

There is live coverage from international chess tournaments almost everyday. Events like Linare’s, European championships, Dortmund and tons of other tournaments is covered, and often there is GM’s kibitching the position with the crowd for example Yasser Seirawan come here regulary and explain the games.

There are training lessons many times pr week. Grandmaster will do a free training sesion in the training room with a system called TVChessbase they send live television via windows multimedia player.

Also if you want you can take online chess lessons from other players. There is a virtuel money system called “Ducat” where you can, if you like buy ducast with you creditcard, and then play for ducat’s with other players or buy online lessons from grandmasters.

<Conclusion>

If you are serious about your chess, you want a powefull tool to analyse your games, a database to manage your games. and join the + 3000 people at playchess.com. Then Fritz is the way to go.

It's easy to find all the games that any human player in the Chessgames.com database has played against any and all computer opponents in the database.

If, for example, you wish to see all the games Garry Kasparov has played against any and all computer Chess programs, simply do the following:

On the Chessgames.com homepage, in the Advanced Search section, set the "Player is" dropdown menu to "Kasparov"; then in the "Opposing Player is" textbox (beneath the dropdown menu), simply type in "computer". Now, click "Find Chess Games!"

Wham!! You will see a list of all the computer opponents that Garry Kasparov has played that are in the Chessgames.com database! At the time of this writing, that's 77 games against a delightful array of processor patzers and GUI Grandmasters from 1985 to 2003!

(Does ANY prominent player have so many games against computer programs as Mr. Kasparov? I think it speaks well of the now-retired champion that he has been so bold in this kind of competition over the years!)

Cheers!

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)
Bishop Berkeley's Chess Interface:
http://www.bbbbbb.org/

P.S. For those of you who are lazy (like me, often enough!), you may click this link to see all 77 of Mr. Kasparov's computer contests:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

I recall what the Dalai Lama once said (and I found myself agreeing), "Physically I am very lazy, but mentally, VERY ACTIVE!"

I want to code a simple C# program to control a chess engine like Spike (which is chess960 enabled), to produce a simple yet important report per chess game. Fritz and ChessMaster and Arena and the rest simply refuse to provide decent reporting functionality, so I need to code some for myself.

[2]
Maybe I am the only one, but I think the Fritz8 menus in the user interface should have been overhauled (and some other UI aspects too). They need to be simpler and more self-documenting. Too many details to list here. I fear/suspect Fritz9 will have no improvements in this area. Instead efforts go into making it play stronger, which borders on silly since it can already crush 99.98% of all its customers. The Fritz8 menu item "Full Analysis..." is a lie or an exaggeration.

[3]
How do I get Fritz8 to play both sides after I set up a new position?

[4]
I want to give Fritz a .PGN file and click a new "Analyze All" menu. Hours later when the analysis is done, I want a report with the following 9 columns:

[] Move-pair number
[] Actual White move
[] Actual Position eval
[] Actual Black move
[] Actual Position eval

[] Fritz White move (the move Fritz would have made for White) [] Eval after Fritz White

[] Fritz Black move (the move Fritz would have made for Black) [] Eval after Fritz Black

[] Nothing else, no clutter.

I want this report in plain ASCII text (or Html?), columns aligned by spaces not tabs. All the games inside the .PGN should be in the output report. Below is a rough example (shown in Reversible Algebraic Notation). Understand the Html format transforms this to an unaligned/ugly look (but you get the idea):

Real Real Real Real Fritz Fritz Fritz Fritz

White Eval Black Eval White Eval Black Eval

23. Nf3d4 +.2 f75 +.3 (same) +.2 Kg8h +.2

24. Qd3g? -1.5 Re8:B2 -1.6 Rf1e +.3 (same) -1.6

Personally I feel this is a succinct format for presenting an annotated game. To me it seems more *practical* and more *consistently interesting* than the common annotation format of giving numerous unannotated moves following by a couple long variations after one move. I wonder how many people ever follow most of those long variations - major hassle to reset the pieces etc. I think this report would take the Fritz programmer one day to code. It is just giving Fritz a position and telling it to calculate. But version release after version release Fritz's reporting capabilities remain meager to non-existent. I am tired of waiting.

Arena has a much more nimble release cycle, so Arena could release strong reporting functionality long before its competition could answer in the marketplace. But first they need to agree that the importance of reporting functionality has been underrated for too long.

Is there a .NET wrapper class?

<How do I get Fritz8 to play both sides after I set up a new position?>

The feature that does this is the "Shootout" feature, which I've used many times. The help file should fill you on the details (or you might search Google or Google groups with the 3 words: fritz chess shootout). But in the main, you can copy an entire PGN file to the Windows clipboard and then Edit > Paste it to the interface, just as if you are going to start a new game; then, you go to Tools > Analysis > Shootout. The "Blitz" or "Long Game" time parameters should be (by default) the last ones you used in the playing mode. You will also be able to choose among several engines, not only Fritz.

It is a very nice feature! It is available (to my knowledge) in all the Chessbase interfaces ( Shredder (Computer) , Junior (Computer) , etc.)

Hope this is helpful!

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)

1 I have no idea what you are talking about, sorry i am not a programmer :)

2. Yes Fritz is not as user frindly as for example chessmaster, on the other hand it has 10 times as many features, it just takes a litle work to figure out how to use them. If you follow this link and goto T notes there is a good chance you, will find a detailed describtion of the feature you want to use, many of the articles for previus versions of fritz, also work for fritz 8.

http://www.chessbase.com/support/in...

The rumor is that Fritz 9 will be more user friendly, and play more human like. You can read about it here. http://www.chesscafe.com/text/mig26...

3 You can do that by using the shootout feature.
http://www.chessbase.com/support/wo...

4 Open the database. When you are in the database main window open the pgn file containing the games you want to analyse. Click the games from the pgn file you want to analyse (Ctrl+a) if you want to analyse them all, (or hold Ctrl and click each game from within the DB that you want to analyse) When the games you want to analyse are highlited, goto menu Tools > analys > blunder check. (blunder check is identical to full analys, but it will also give the position eval in 100/pawns's). Select the parameters for your analys http://www.chessbase.com/support/su...
http://www.chessbase.com/support/su...

After the analys is done (this can take a long time depending on the number of games, and parameters you have set) The games will be automaticly saved into the datbase with the info(fritz8) in the tournament header, indicating that this is a game anotated by fritz.

Now click the games fritz has analysed, just as you did earlyer, when all the games you want to have a text output for is highlited, right click your mouse, and select Output > selection to textfile. Chose the format you want the text in (PGN, text, html, or what you prefer)

And now you should have a text file containing all the information from the analysed games :)

(: ♗ Bishop Berkeley ♗ :)

Chesscentral says October 25 for $46.95, free shipping: http://www.chesscentral.com/softwar...

BCM says "end of october", for Euro 34.50, shipping is 3 Euros: http://www.bcmchess.co.uk/fritz9.html

Chessbase says end of October, for $53.44, shipping is not free. http://www.chessbase.com/shop/produ...

Furthemore, each one claims a different feature:

Amazon barely mentions any features at all, but it does have some nice screenshots that I have not seen elsewhere.

Chesscentral lays out a lot of features, but even these have some contradictions. For example, at the beginning it claims that it contains 4 hours of video for advanced players. Yet near the end of the article it claims that it contains 5 hours of video for advanced players!

BCM appears to have the oldest data. It only claims that it contains 3 hours of video for advanced players...

Chessbase also claims only 3 hours of video for advanced players.

I don't know why they would delay it, form what I've heard the program is virtually all in English already when it was released in Germany.

I also find it strange that Chessbase hasn't talked much about it. Perhaps it's because it was produced by Viva Media instead of them.