Originally posted by Jakal
I use Chessmaster, the Grandmaster Edition to analyze all my games. I've been hearing a lot about Fritz and how great it is for analyzing games. At the level that I am at, roughly in the mid 1400s, is it worth investing the money to buy Fritz, or is Chessmaster enough. What does fritz have that Chessmaster doesn't?
I have CM10, and I tried analyzing with it once. What a pain in the you-know-what! The analysis may be OK (although I didn't really pay attention to what it was saying), but just the mechanics of doing the analysis was not very ergonomic (efficient).
Having said that, I also have Fritz 8, and some of the menu structuring of F8 seems very non-intuitive to me. (Or maybe I just don't think like Germans. 🙂 ) The F12 GUI was redesigned, so I'd hope that it's more intuitive, but I have no idea about that.
What kind of analysis do you do? Is it just blunder checking to see what tactics you've missed? (That's all I use engine analysis for.) If so, I suspect Fritz would be overkill. Maybe you could try the free Arena 2.0.1 at www.playwitharena.com. Click on the "Arena Downloads" link on the left of the page, then download the "Arena 2.0.1 Setup" file.
Arena won't give you any verbal analysis, but it will spot the tactical blunders. One bug I noticed with Arena is that if I added any annotation symbols to a game and then saved it to a PGN file, it will save the annotation symbols to the file - BUT, when I reload the game file, the annotation symbols don't appear in the Arena window. I've checked all the settings that I can find - It just seems to be a bug as far as I can tell.