Fritz -- worth it?

The Mrs. is desperate to find me a Christmas present this year and I was thinking about sending her in the direction of the Fritz computer program.

My question: Is it worth it?

I have heard good things, but the "price tag" seems high to me.

Thoughts?

I guess it comes down to

1) would you use the 6 months of premium playchess?

2) Does the let's check feature interest you at all?

3) Do you have a prior version of fritz or other engine that uses the fritz gui.

Originally posted by BlueEyedRook
The Mrs. is desperate to find me a Christmas present this year and I was thinking about sending her in the direction of the Fritz computer program.

My question: Is it worth it?

I have heard good things, but the "price tag" seems high to me.

Thoughts?

Having bought two main chess products, fritz 8 and chessbase 11, i found i used chessbase database far FAR more than i used fritz. Personally, i'd sooner pay the money for chessbase database and download freeware chess engines (such as houdhini) and simply plug them into the database and have the best of both Worlds...😉

Originally posted by BlueEyedRook
The Mrs. is desperate to find me a Christmas present this year and I was thinking about sending her in the direction of the Fritz computer program.

My question: Is it worth it?

I have heard good things, but the "price tag" seems high to me.

Thoughts?

In my opinion,it's not worth it.No commercial engine is worth it for amateurs.
Plenty of good,free engines out there.
You probably wouldn't use it much anyway.

Ask a shirt or socks 😉

I agree about chessbase being far more useful than the fritz gui but there are some features only the gui can do (obviously their plan to get you to buy both.) I hadn't updated my fritz gui since like fritz 8?! so it was a big step up from that.

The let's check thing is really the selling point of the new fritz-so if you don't have any interest in that then Torten is probably right, get socks.

Yeah, but if you think the price tag on Fritz is high, wait till you get a load of Chessbase.

Truth be told I passed on upgrading from cb10 to 11 because I couldn't find a single improvement worth 100 euros....

It's sad how little chessbase has innovated since about cb 8.

Some old-fashioned pulp-and-paste chess books and a free download of Crafty would be the way to go, IMHO.

Have to plug my favorite chess product: Chess Assistant. It's reasonably priced, has better features than Chessbase (searches!) and has a fully functional playing program.
One of the best parts is it generates eco tables on the fly. It is really amazing.

Check it out if you are to the point where programs and databases may help your game.