What is your Favourite Chess Software – poll?

Chess is what drove my interest to software in the first place, and in a way, the two have been fuelling my curiosity for each other. On this blog I write about chess software quite a bit, with the recent focus on free tools in particular. I added a new poll to the blog – I am curious to learn what chess tools are really the most popular among the readers of this blog. Please make your choice:

Play Like Mikhail Botvinnik – free training course

Convekta has released a free course for their Peshka Training software. The course is easy to install and start using and consists of two main parts – Theory and Practice.

Theory mode consists of lightly annotated games played by Botvinnik.

Practice mode is probably the more useful part of this free offer

In practice mode you also get to see statistics – either per lesson, or overall

Percentage of correct moves - I have not solved a single exercise correctly

In practice mode you literally get to train to play like Mikhail Botvinnik – and test from your strategic skills to tactics. Around 10 years ago I thoroughly studied a collection of games by Mikhail Botvinnik and got a great deal of respect for his art of planning and brief and clear explanations that got to the essence of every position. This course is exactly what a chess student would want to have after going through such a collection. To summarize:

Pros of this course:

• It is free!
• A large number of examples
• Exercise format is well implemented – your time is tracked for every position, and you can see various metrics on your progress

Cons:

• I’d like to see more verbal explanations, especially given the nature of Botvinnik’s positional style