Say 1 (or more!) things to help me improve

I would very much like to improve. I've been stuck kicking around
1500 for too long, playing too many games and not caring about my
chess. The enjoyment has been there (less so recently)...but now I
want to get better.

The purpose of this post is an attempt to glean any useful nuggets of
information from those who may be able to help me.

I have started by cutting back on my number of games. I have a little
way to go yet. I want to look and study the given position more deeply
in more of my games, rather than just a handful.

I own one chess book, namely "My System" by Nimzowitsch. I have
looked at certain sections and worked through them (though
extensively). I am thinking about purchasing "500 Master Games of
Chess" by Tartakower, "MCO" as a reference book, "The Art of Attack"
by Vukovic and a book on endgames. The "Reassess your chess"
series looks interesting but I am confused over which to get and what
order to look at them in.

Any advice anybody can give on the role that computers can play will
be very gratefully received. I have seen people recommend Fritz 7,
Scid, WinBoard, chessbase light, and several others. Once again, I am
confused. What I mainly wish to know is what exactly I could use Fritz
7 for and what kinds of things Scid can be used for. Do I need an
additional pgn viewer for games with annotations?

Forgive my ignorance (or laugh heartily but then help) but can I use
some kind of program to feed the first 8 moves into a game and for it
to then offer up all the games in the database which match those 8
moves? Can I sort all the entries in a database by opening
classification? In short, what things can I use a computer for to help
improve my chess? What do you recommend doing and which
programs do you recommend to do it with?

I have discovered a wealth of information on the internet and useful
websites. The Exeter one, the play better guide at letsplaychess.com
(I think it was), TWIC, chessopolis.com, chesslab.com and others
besides.

I have recently found a preference for Queen's Pawn openings for
white as well as black. I like the Slav especially as black. I also LOVE
the Ruy Lopez for both black and white but generally in King's Pawn
Openings I get bogged down in the French (although I don't mind too
much playing it as black) and a little lost in the Sicilian (I nearly
always play 2.c3 as white). I hate the exchange variation of the French
and also hate the Knight's variation of the French. I am more than
happy to play against the KIA (ask Danforth ;o)) but feel uneasy as
white when playing against the Pirc.

I have no idea if someone is able to look at all that and say "Hmmm,
you seem to prefer closed games" or whatever.

Anyway, all I'm wondering is if you've made it down to here and there
is something that you think you could say to help me regarding
anything (when I say that I mean I'd prefer it to be chess related but
not gussy ;o)) then I'd be very thankful if you did so.

Mark
Eager to get better

I'm not the better person here to help you with chess since you're
better than me! 🙂 But there is my suggestion: For the books I
hardly recommend "How to reasses your chess" from silman! There is
so many information about middle game in that book! Silmann is a
very good pedagogue with lot of very clear explanation and methods
to for improving your middle games! For chess software I'm not very
use to it but I tried to very popular ones: Fritz and chessmaster 9000.
I used to have fritz on my computer but I didn't like it. It wasn't very
user friendly.... or maybe it's because I'm too dumb to use that
program of maybe it's because I had a german version of the
game!! 🙂 Anyway I didn't like it at all..... I also tried chessmaster
9000 couple weeks ago from a friend and I found it very cool! It's
simple to understand and you have a learning section with
commented games by IM Waitzkin, a big opening tree and large
database of games! I will get a copy of that one very soon and I hope
that's gonna help me! 🙂 For the opening... it's REALLY true that you
have facility agaisnt the KIA... I think that you're better in close
position... but that's just my humble thoughts! 🙂

This is not much but I hope that's gonna help you a bit! 🙂 By the
way are you up for another game against me? Maybe we could share
some chess knowledge to help improving each other! 🙂

p.s. What's the best between a real opening chess book and a chess
opening cd-rom like what you can get at chessbase???

Can't say much about the books you should use, but I will talk about the chess
programs:
Two categories:

1) Chess playing programs.
These are the programs that will play chess against you.
Part A: stuff you pay for.
Software you have to buy, usually for around $40-$50 ($US) include: Fritz7,
Chessmaster 9000, Nimzo, Shredder, etc. These are the most powerful programs
around.
Fritz7 can apparenly play chess approaching that of a Master (grandmaster
even?) level player. It is currently considered the strongest chess playing
program out there, but the others are not supposed to be far behind. If what
you want is to play chess against the strongest opponent you can find, then
Fritz is your program.
Chessmaster is apparently not quite as strong as Fritz 7, but I don't think
its all that far behind. One possible advantage it has over Fritz is that it
comes with a series of chess lessons. What I don't know is whether or not
those chess lessons are too simple for you - they may be geared for the
beginner just learning about tactics, ie "this is a pin", "this is a fork",
level, but I'm not sure. But if the lessons are to your level, then this gives
Chessmaster a clear advantage over Fritz, which comes with little to nothing
that I would call training material.

Part B: stuff for free:
Writing chess playing programs is a very popular hobby. So there are lots of
free chess programs out there of varying quality.
First let me start by saying there are two separate programs used to play
computer chess (this is true for commercial software too, you just don't see
it).
The first half is the "board". There are two popular programs to do this. The
most popular is one called "Winboard" and is written by a fellow named Steve
Mann. The second is called "Arena", can't remember who its by. Both provide a
graphical interface to the second program, the "brain" program if you will.
Almost every free chess program out there works with these two Graphical chess
boards.

OK the second half. The "brain" - or "chess engine" as they are called. This
is the program that actually "knows about chess" and makes the moves and does
all the thinking. There are tons and tons of these for free, of varying
quality. Apparently trying to write a strong chess program is a very popular
hobby. One of the strongest is a program called "Crafty". Crafty isn't as
strong as the commercial programs,but it is supposed to play at least at
"expert" level, perhaps approaching master level.

There are other good free programs. BUT THERE ARE ALSO A LOT OF DOG'S - some
can't even always make legal moves, some play so terrible even I can beat
them. But they are all free. You download them, tell Winboard (or Arena) to
use them as the chess engine, and test them. If they give you a good game,
keep them. If they suck, toss them. No cost to you.

Oh, Winboard alone (ie without coupling a chess engine program to it) can be
used as a PGN viewer.

2) 2nd part
Chess database programs.
I'll talk about SCID, because that's the only one I know and use.
It's a program for viewing and studying chess games.
Yes you can do EXACTLY the sort of things you mention. Feed in the first few
moves, look for EVERY game in it's game databasethat has reached that
position.
Get back too many games? Tell it to only give you games where white wins, or
games where the players have a certain rating.
Wanna study Capablanca's games? Tals? Kasparovs? Just enter their names, get
their games.
From any given position you give it, it can generate an "opening report",
based on the highest rated games with that same position. It will tell you all
sorts of interesting things; what different mover orders reached this
position; what the common responses to this move were, and so forth.

Granted this is just computer generated, so it doesn't have any human analysis
behind it. But I find it dang helpful.

One thing. SCID is the program. In addition you need the database. The author
of Scid provides a database of about 400 - 500 thousand games you can download
too (in pieces). You can also go find other sources of games in PGN notation
and add them to the database.

Oh, you can also use SCID just as a PGN viewer.

There is also chessbase light. My understanding is that it is a free version
of a commercial product. They give it away to try to hook you into buying
their commerical version. I believe the "light" version is "light" because
they limit the number of games you can have in your database to something like
7000. I tried it after I got SCID, didn't play with it for more than ten
minutes, so can't really tell you much about it.

Ah, one final thing on all the free software: Winboard, Arena, Crafty, Scid.
Unlike commercial products, where you just stick the disk in and click a
button to miraculously install the software, these will occasionally require
you to edit a configuration file by...drum roll....hand. Really not difficult
at all, but certainly not as thought free as installing commercial products.
You may have to know, for instance, what a directory is...

Hope my longwindedness is of some help. If you decide to try any of the free
stuff and have more questions, let me know.

Michael

1) It's Tim Mann, not Steve Mann. Site is
www.tim-mann.org/chess.html
If you download Winboard, it automatically comes with a chess engine calle
"Gnu chess".
2)Arena can be found at:
http://www.playwitharena.com/

3: crafty is written by Dr. Robert Hyatt.
descriptions of it can be found at:
http://www.mark-yatras.org/chess/
and the program itself can be downloaded, via ftp from:
ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/

Yay! Thank you so much maggoteer. I've only just browsed through
what you wrote but will read more closely later when I have more time.

I really, really appreciate the time and effort put it.

Thanks again,

Mark
The Squirrel Lover

Fritz. From what you said it seems that it offers little more than just
being a very strong engine. Is there anything else that Fritz can do
(that Scid and other things cannot)?

I have seen some of the tutorials in Chessmaster 8000 on a friend's
computer and liked them.

I have read posts from Mustangace (and others) extolling the virtues
of Fritz very highly indeed. Perhaps someone can suggest how or in
what way Fritz could be used by someone looking to improve?
Features and advantages that are not offered by the free software
that maggoteer names?

Thanks in advance for any help :o)

Mark
The Squirrel Lover

Energize bunny man here, just going and going and going....

OK, fritz had a few other features. (I had Fritz 7 for a while, then sold it
because I just didn't use it.) Since it is the overwhelming favorite of top
players, let's let them tell you why they like it.

But I'll tell you more why I didn't - and why I sold it off.

1) I hated the documentation, or lack of documentation. Oh, yeah, a little
manual came with it. Didn't even describe most of the features.

2) Came with a slick customizable interface. Unfortunately, I'd spend twenty
minutes customizing it to how I wanted, then it would randomly reset to
something else. Claimed it could save these customizations and use them as
defaults. For some reason, it just couldn't save the look I wanted. I could
get it to save other looks, just not the one I wanted...

3) Claimed it had "extensive learning tools". I got it thinking that meant
tutorials similar to what is found in Chessmaster (which was not available at
the time, between editions). Instead, all I ever found as "learning tools"
were a couple of pretty lame features, like the ability to hilight squares
under attack. That would be useful for someone's first few chess games ever,
but quickly became annoying.

4) Engine was way too powerful for me. I doubt I'd ever ever ever be able to
beat it. Me, I want a program I can beat sometimes, maybe 15-20% of the me.
Granted the Fritz chess engine is tunable. You can fiddle with all sorts of
parameters to get to to play differently and more weakly, things like whether
the program prefers kingside or queens side attacks, and so forth. Can't
remember all the details, but think there were other things like how defensive
vs agressive, how important king safety was, did it like bishop pairs, etc. My
experience was that I only got two sorts of play out of it by teaking stuff:
still too strong or idiotic.
To give Fritz a break, this is supposed to be a problem with Chessmaster also.
Chessmaster also has a tunable engine AND apparently comes with a large number
of prebuilt "personalities" that play chess differently, along with the
ability to customize and tweak your own personalities. In fact, Chessmaster
says they speficially chose the chess engine they use (called "The King&quot😉
because it was very tuneable. However, I've read a few rather negative reviews
about these different personalities, namely that they aren't very realistic.

For this last note, I read in several places that if one wants to play against
varying styles, get different programs that inherently play differently. Many
of the commercial programs can be tweaked to try to play different styles; the
consensus I've read is most of this tweaking just makes them play oddly. If
you want an attacking program get one that was designed from the ground up to
be attacking. If you want one thats plays like Petrosian, get one that was
designed to play that way. Don't try to tweak one into playing like the other.

And to end: take my opinions, and everyone elses with a grain of salt. Best
bet, find someone with a copy of Fritz, play it, see if you like what it has
to offer.

Apparently Fritz has a built in database of about 200,000 games. Guess I
didn't play around with it long enough to discover that. As my hero Homer
Simpson says - "Du-oh!"

Not sure what chessmaster has as far as game databases.
Oh, speaking of Chessmaster, I know there are a variety of versions available
at different prices. Depending on what version of Windows you are or are not
running, they may or may not work. Older versions (like CM 7000) seem to NOT
work with the newest Windows, Windows XP. Ah the joys of computers....

Also, it looks like a new version of Fritz is due for release.Looks like it
may have more training features. Interesting.....

Hey Michael, fancy a game? Send one over if you want! (And anyone
else who reads this. Just remember to say Hi!)

Rein

Endgame.
Double the amount of time you spend studying endgames.When you do that,then
double it again!

Thanks! Endgames are crucial I agree. How do I go about improving
my endgame though? Books? Going through games? Playing lots of
them?

Mark
The Squirrel Lover

The "Reassess your chess"
series looks interesting but I am confused over which to get and what
order to look at them in.

Thanks for your reply twotowers. Muchly appreciated!

With a bit of luck Father Christmas may have a book or two for me in
a few weeks time. Provided I've been a good buy this year of course 😀

One thing Santa won't be able to deliver however is the will to work
and study. The more people I speak to the more obvious it becomes
that books and programs and databases are junk if they're not
coupled with hard work.

Anyway, thanks again for posting 🙂

Mark

HI again, Mark

Just to clarify, by "work" I'm not so much talking about time spent studying as much as mental attitude while you're playing or studying. There are no short-cuts or magic formulas that will take the work out of calculating the variations of a position. You need to calculate 3 moves ahead every single move of a game with tournament time controls or 1 move ahead every single move of a 5-minute game.
If this sounds like "work," look at it this way…you're playing strength just increased 200 points, and you haven't cracked a book. If you're like me (and the students Silman picks apart in the book), there's a point in the game where it seems like we're on the verge of winning game and it seems like calculating 3 or 4 moves deep will be enough to win the game and we do it.
On the other hand, if we have a lost game, calculating 3 or 4 moves deep doesn't seem like it will make a difference. The other situation that is just as dangerous is when we're winning. It is so easy to get lazy once we've got a won game.

I read a line in a tennis book once that said "Keeping your eye on the ball is work, but not keeping your eye on the ball takes more work"…meaning that by not focusing your mental energy on the ball, you end up spending more physical energy running all over the court. Kind of in the same way, since I've been focusing more energy into calculating , I'm enjoying playing more and my games have been more intense and more exciting. And in the same way, I'm enjoy more and getting more out of any studying I do (I really haven't had much time to devote to studying either)

Hope this all kind of makes sense (it took me 15 years before it made sense to me http://www.redhotpawn.com/images/forums/sml-wink.gif )

Bryan