Searching for Patterns and Combinations using various Chess Software

I already wrote about search in a couple of posts, and these features of ChessBase and Chess Assistant are surprisingly still essentially unchanged and relevant:
Online tactics: Find Sacrifices feature in Chessbase Light
Chess Assistant feature - Search for current pawn structure and material

Since then I found two more interesting search features:

1) SCID has this pawn structure search that I was not aware of:

2) Also Chessbase has relatively recently added an ability to search for similar pawn structures. 

Still, you can’t directly search for IQP with Chessbase, and it seems that only Chessbase allows to search for sacrifices (if you are aware of other programs that can do that – please leave a comment!). That’s why we have more than one chess database software …

Best Tools to Work with Chess PGN Files

Today I will give a brief overview of how well different Chess Database software packages support the PGN file format.

Fritz - reads and writes

ChessBase (multiple versions on various platforms, including Light/Full, Windows/Mobile, etc) - reads and writes, except for CB Light

Chess Assistant (Full and Light) - read and writes
ChessX - reads, but writes have some issues
SCID - reads, but does not write

(If you know of another software that supports PGN files - please leave a comment.)

With so many tools that support PGN files, does that mean that you can use them interchangeably to update the same files? Yes and no. The major caveats are as follows:

• Each tool exports moves with a slightly different new line format
• Each tool (or even different versions of the same software) updates headers in its own way, putting PGN header tags in a different order. That results in issues such as player names in the game headers cannot read properly by some versions of the same packages. 
• Additional formatting, such as arrows, diagrams, highlighted squares, and engine evaluations also follow a different convention. So arrows you draw in Fritz, will likely show up as garbage if you open up the same PGN file in Chess Assistant and vice versa. What's even worse - if you add a diagram for a position in Chess Assistant, hoping to be able to print it from Fritz, you'd be in for a disappointment.

To learn more about this (and to possibly bypass some of these issues) - read my recent post Editing Pgn Files without ChessBase or Other Database Program – Syntax Highlighting or other posts I wrote about PGN.

Improve your Chess with a Free Chess Database program - Scid Vs Pc

Scid Vs. Pc is a Chess Database program. You can get it at http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net . In this video I give an overview of the program, show how to enter new games, annotate the move, and batch annotate the games with an engine (aka "annofritz").

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:

SCID vs PC latest release – docking feature

I am very impressed with the very latest release of SCID vs PC 4.9. It has a docking feature, which up to this point had been missing in this otherwise excellent (and free!) software product.

I can move sub-windows around, and as one would expect, as I navigate through the move in the game, SCID updates the tree view.

As a side note, while playing with docking, I also realized that any database in SCID can also be opened as a tree, which is very handy, and allows to look at multiple trees at the same time!

Preparing for an Opponent in Scid – Player Report

This is a simple walkthrough of how to use SCID to prepare for a specific opponent in your future games.
In SCID Tools –> Player Report brings up the following window:

Clicking “OK” generates the report for the selected player. Moves and themes are looks particularly interesting:

But what we mostly care about is the opening, so that’s what it looks like:

This can be printed and analyzed with the board, or you can click links and load games into SCID.
Again, SCID proves out to be a very functional chess tool that gives you your chess database essentials.

Chess Software – SCID vs. ChessBase – Cultural Differences

In his famous article titled Biculturalism, a famous software “expert” Joel Spolsky asks a rherorical question - “What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers?” His answer is simple: “for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.”

Looking at the chess software called SCID I realized that in comparison with other most popular software such as ChessBase, it clearly comes from a different culture. Where it becomes most noticeable is an ability to customize, extend and automate each program.

 Customizing ChessBase or ChessBase Light, or Fritz (and same applies to Chess Assistant and Convekta’s tools) – is mostly done via updating shortcuts and moving window layout with a mouse. Customizing SCID is achieved by updating text files on disk or adding sets of images in a different directory. Staying textual is what Joel says is typical for the Unix culture.

Automation is another component where the two differ – automating SCID can be achieved via writing TCL scripts that use a clearly defined interface (API) that has been a natural part of the software's architecture - http://scid.sourceforge.net/doc/progref.html. Nearly everything that is done by the SCID UI goes through the same interface. You can also run SCID without user interface at all, and just use the core system from the command line, as it was clearly intended to be used by a programmer.

Automating FRITZ is only possible by using whatever automation has been provided in the main user interface (so you can print several games at once – that’s the kind of “automation” it mostly provides). Aquarium (another Windows program) at some point added a scripting interface, as the developers realized that a lot of their users would like to extend a tool. However it clearly seemed like like a “slap on” effort and that the original system was not designed for this. Limitations and bugs seemed to be endless – at least that’s the impression I got based on user feedback online.

In the end of day, it is not surprising that Fritz is the most popular chess software while most chess fans have never heard about SCID unless they are using Linux as they are primary operating system. Marketing has a lot to do with it, and so does the slightly strange looking window layout that SCID uses. It is also important to remember that ChessBase’s founder Frederic Friedel was one of the pioneers of chess software from the mid-eighties, so it is only fair that his products succeed.

I do hope, however, that the community behind SCID will continue to grow as there are so many things it can do that many do not realize. Also, in the time of many new platforms emerging very quickly - having something written for a programmer makes it easy to port software, so is not surprising that Apps like SCID on the go become popular and appear for free even before larger software companies find the resources to port their windows oriented programs to mobile (and some of them never do because it is too complicated). Sometimes biculturalism is a good thing!

PS.

- “SCID on the Go” UI  - ever wonder why the free “SCID on the go” can read SCID’s native database format, and $5 ChessBase on Android (which is wonderful otherwise) – can’t do that for ChessBase format? Might have something to do with the “UI is the most important thing” approach in the original system).

Effeciently Using Clock Time in a Chess Game

In order to improve my time management - I keep track of time I spend on every move during tournament games. Those get scribbled into score sheets by hand and then I enter them into the database by hand together with the moves themselves.

Do I ever look at them again? Not very often until now – having discovered how handy it is to look at this data in SCID score graph, so after converting values into the graph-friendly format, I can see my remaining time visually – from 100 minutes remaining on the clock to 0. I can see that my time took a drive on move 13 or so in a recent game I played.
 

Clicking on the dot on the graph – I can recall that I was trying to spend some time out of the opening – trying to find a plan, before playing 14… Qe7. Was it justified? Looking at the graph above – probably not.

SCID Score Graph feature

SCID (also available as “SCID vs. PC”) has a great feature where based on annotated games (that SCID can also do for you) – you can generate evaluation graphs. They are called Score Graph and are available under tools menu.

Clicking on the place in the graph where the evaluation took a dive on move 14, I can find that White just dropped a piece by leaving the bishop unprotected.

 

In this case this gives me a better picture of the flow of the game than many verbal annotations that often accompany chess games. SCID does it, and not only for the game that you just played, but for any game stored in your database with engine evaluations!

SCID Feature – Personal Chess Rating Graph

I have always been wondering why many commercial chess programs don’t let me visualize my rating progress from my own database of games, and was glad to find that free chess database software SCID has this feature. Here are a couple of my charts:

My ICC rating for games with “standard” time controls (15 min+):

The drops usually correspond to times when I had to re-start my ICC account and gradually grow the rating from scratch.

My CFC/FIDE rating:

These graphs not only shows periods of rating rise and fall, but also periods of declined activity, not bad at all for a free program! My CFC rating clearly shows that most of my chess growth happened in 1998-2001. That time range coincides to lot of data points, confirming that to improve – you need to play more!