if someone is totally green about chess databases, whast advice would you give that person to start?
Assume that they don't know even the first thing about them. That's names, prices, functions, how they work, what they can do as far as helping a person improve their game, etc., etc.m on and on down the line.
Yeah, I'm confessing, I'm one of those rare people who doesn't own one, and doesn't know where to even start. truth is, I'm really not clear on what they DO, except I think that they hold thousands of games from master play in their memory for reference and study.
This is really embarrasing, but the old adage is :"The only stupid question is an unasked question." So I'm asking.
I have chessbase 10 at home. It costs about £100, comes with a cd with 1 million+ games on. You can use it to create opening reports, ie- you can open a board, play 4 moves and then search the database for all the games that have reached that position. Once you have all these games, the database will show all the different moves that have been played as a continuation from that position. You can sort them by elo rating so your only looking at GM games and so on...
It's really usefull as you can learn openings by playing through games rather than taking someone elses analysis of the position as correct. This requires more effort on your part but is much more rewarding than blindly following opening theory.
You can also use it to study end games. By selecting the number of pawns and pieces you want to analyse, you can search the database by, say, asking for end games with 2 rooks each and 3 pawns plays 4.
This is just the tip of the ice berg really. Some people create seperate databases of the openings that they play in order to develop the opening theory themselves.
The advantage to lower plyers such as ourselves is it takes some of the tedium out ofstudying. I find it difficult to plot out a GM game on a board and analyse it at the same time. I'll often move the pieces around while i think, only to find i can't reproduce the correct position in order to continue studying the same game. With a Database you can add your thoughts to the game and analyse it properly and then save it. A few months of that and your really feel your starting to get somewhere, rather than just reading and forgetting books.
It also means you can look through lots of games very quickly and see how different people deal with certain positions.
If you study a lot and you have a lot of half read books, i highly recommend a datase as a study aid. I don't use mine on RHP, i just use it for study. Having said that, a lot of players use them to make decisions about which lines to play, as you can do a statistical analysis of an opening to find the most successful moves.
Ooh, i almost forgot. If you wanted, you could load in all your RHP games and run a statistical analysis. This would point out weak points in your armour, ie- you loose 89% of your games played against the french defense. With this information you can obviously work out what parts of your game need the most attention and maximise the usefulness of your study time.🙂
You can keep your databases up to date at http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/twicp.html
Wanna play against God? Go to http://www.k4it.de/index.php?topic=egtb
By the way, all 3, 4, and 5-man tablebases are kindly avaiable free from http://www.chesslib.no/Nalimov.htm