Game analysis Chessmaster beats Stockfish

Hi,

I'm new. Right now I'm using Chessmaster to analyse fairly basic games. Since I really don't yet need very in depth analysis I set it to 10 seconds/move.

I also use Stockfish 4 in Lucas Chess.

I like both because they both tell you what your move leads to and also tell you a better move.

My problems:
1. On my i7 laptop both give pretty much the same advice (Stockfish x64 modern sse). 2 cores, 4 threads.
2. On my desktop (Q9450, 4 cores) Stockfish x64 consistently sees mate 1-2 moves later (yes later) than Chessmaster. It does slightly improve with a larger hash table size (6144 Mb!).
3. Chessmaster is exactly the same on both computers.

I don't like Fritz (it also misses the mate and also doesn't tell you what your move leads to, it just tells you a better move or when it feels like it another worse move as an example). Both using Blunder check and Full analysis.

Arena adds the variations as comments with no move numbers so you can't move through the variation.

What I am keen on is playing through my games with nice Chessmaster commentary and then checking on Lucas chess (not wanting the same variations, just a check of my moves, its interpretation). I love the way you can play through variations on Lucas Chess and play through how your move would have gone against a stronger opponent. Fritz and Arena only do half of this.

I've tried Critter, Houdini, Rybka and Stockfish. My desktop doesn't see the mate.

Can anyone tell me any ideas to get the other analysis up to speed (on Lucas Chess ideally), or tell me how to make Arena save variations as actual variations and not unnumbered comments and tell you how your move would be please? I can't increase my hash table size any more.

White to move. No engine other than Chessmaster sees the mate even with 40 seconds/move vs Chessmaster's 10 seconds/move.

Thanks,

Jonathan

How many moves? tried the hiracs forum?

when chessmaster was the king was the risc 2500 it was sold for being better at checkmates then fritz so... 🙂

I use stockfish in conjunction with chessx on my mac to analyse games I've played.

After 20 seconds it gave me a mate in 8. Still not as fast as your chessmaster result, as you mention. I'm running a 5+ year old 2ghz dual core imac with 4gigs of ram, should that matter.

I like the combination of chessx and stockfish, are there any other chess programs on your mac that you like, pickings seem to be slim enough..

Originally posted by Murchu
I use stockfish in conjunction with chessx on my mac to analyse games I've played.

After 20 seconds it gave me a mate in 8. Still not as fast as your chessmaster result, as you mention. I'm running a 5+ year old 2ghz dual core imac with 4gigs of ram, should that matter.

I like the combination of chessx and stockfish, are there any other chess programs on your mac that you like, pickings seem to be slim enough..

Houdini 3 finds mate in 7.

Thanks for the replies. I tried ChessX because of the above and prefer the way it adds variations to the way Arena does.

Anyway, I've fixed it - somehow the multi pv setting in analysis bit of Lucas Chess had got set to maximum. Now it is at 1 and working better, though I do have to start analysis from the end of the game to get it close to Chessmaster. I guess Chessmaster is just more consistent on the two computers (one old) I happen to have at this time setting.