Learning from your mistakes - Lichess has best online chess features and is free!

This is a demo of the latest features of lichess. You can learn from your games immediately after playing them, review tactical mistakes, opening inaccuracies, all in the interactive training mode! I am very impressed with it so far.

Building Chess Opening Repertoire - Video Tutorial

This is a 3-part tutorial for building a chess database with all your openings. The process is also described in my book "How to Study Chess Openings".


If you intend to store your opening preparation in a computer database, this method will save you a lot of time with a well tested approach.

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 …

Chess Composition - Eliminating Duplicate Solutions – Automatically?

Recently there have been headlines along the lines of "A Machine Composes Problems". The question I am interested in here however is a bit different - with so many chess problems and studies having been composed over the last two three hundred years, it would be curious to test their correctness in a fashion as automatic as possible.

The test would have to check both that the problem is correct, and that the problem one and only one solution. Loading a position into Fritz is obviously going to show that, but how would one automatically run a test on the entire database of checkmate  problems/studies/tactical solutions?

Has anyone heard of such an initiative and whether this has been ever done either by chess composers or engine authors?

I would imagine those two categories of people are probably quite interested in doing something like this.

Looking for a Large Chess Database

With a number of websites offering online chess databases proliferating (the Chessbase one looks nice), it is still surprisingly difficult to find a free large collection of chess games for download – at least from a legitimate source. Ok, not difficult – impossible. With the ICOFY project being suspended, my options are limited again to downloading TWIC updates and merging them to my existing older ICOFY database.

If anyone is aware of any new source of a relatively consistent free chess database for offline download in PGN, SCID or Chessbase formats – please post a comment or let me know!

Computer Precision in a Historic Endgame – Karpov–Kasparov, 1984, game 9

Karpov – Kasparov 1984 match – game 9
 Black to move
In his recent book, Kasparov comments that 66… Bh1 has not found any refutation yet. It is now possible to say that there never will be any refutation because this 8 piece endgame can be completely pre-computed with FinalGen. It is a draw indeed, and Bh1 is the only move! In the game, Kasparov played Bb7 and lost…

Studying Chess Openings – How to Track Your Progress

It is not enough to develop an opening repertoire, it also needs to be continuously refined and practiced. Here is a quick tutorial on how to do this with a free version of Chess Position Trainer. I had previously posted a video tutorial on this tool.
Step 1 – Import Repertoire from PGN file

For now I imported my White Repertoire, which I have been long maintaining in a pgn file/database.
Step 2 – Choose variations to practice
As a starting point, I’d like to limit my practice to Sicilian and Scandinavian defences.

Step 3 – Track your progress
In training mode – alternate between “Only New” and “Only Learned”

Right now, I have only practiced 28 positions out of over 3000, so I have long ways to go, but this gives me a clear picture of where I am at!

Visualizing Chess - What Chess Openings Score Best for White and Black?

Inspired by recent articles on data mining of chess information, I pulled out my query on a chess SQL database that I ran on 1.5 million games, and with the help of Tableau Public – generated this infographic on 500 ECO codes. Here are the results:

• Black does best with the ECO codes in bottom right corner
• White scores best in the top left corner
• For example A94 (Dutch Stonewall with Ba3) is the best scoring code for White
• B59 (Sicilian, Boleslavsky variation) – apparently scores really well for Black.

If you are not too familiar with what opening moves each code corresponds to – this Wikipedia page will be helpful - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings.

Does anything on this chart look surprising? Is your favourite opening in the expected part of the diagram?

FinalGen–Endgame Tablebases On Steroids

Several times I found myself looking for a solution to my problem online without finding it, only to later realize that the tool/utility/service has actually been around available for years. This happened with SCID, and now again with FinalGen. FinalGen is a free GUI utility that allows one to analyze endgames with 7 pieces and more after generating all the necessary data on demand! It is user friendly enough and does not require any complicated command line syntax or configuration, as one could expect. For the position below, it allowed me to generate exact evaluation in less than an hour! Apparently White wins!

Bernstein – Prince, 1946

 White to move – see the complete game here.

I have played and analyzed quite a lot of rook endgames with two pawns vs one, and they often could not be precisely evaluated – until now!

You can get FinalGen on its website http://www.mtu-media.com/finalgen/home_ing.php

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.

Chess Questions - Is there a freely available online 7 piece Endgame tablebase?

Scanning through chess.stackexchange.com website for recent chess-related questions, I came across the following post that I'd also like to pose to the readers of this blog:

Is there a freely available online 7 piece Endgame tablebase?:
The only 7 piece site I heard about is http://tb7.chessok.com/ , and upon registration I am able to setup various positions with 2-6 pieces . However as soon as I setup a position with 7 piece, I get an error about service not being avaiable. Has anyone had better luck or know of any other site with 7 pieces tablebases?

7 piece endgame tablebases solve the mystery of many theoretical endgames, for example Rook endgames with 2 pawns vs. 1, which can be quite tactical if the pawns are on different flanks.

Editing Pgn Files without ChessBase or Other Database Program – Syntax Highlighting

Six years ago I already once wrote about pgn file format, and the benefits of using it for storing and sharing your chess data. While working with many pgn files, I want to be able to load them into a text editor, and do various operations on it that can’t be done easily in a chess database, such as SCID, ChessBase, Chess Assistant, etc. Notepad++ , my favourite editor, lets me

• check spelling
• translate from one language to another
• do massive search and replacements across the entire file (or even many files)
• and many many other things you would normally do in a powerful text editor

The problem with text editors is that normally pgn like any text looks Black/White, and is not very pretty.

Instead I want it to look like this:

Here is the trick: once you loaded the pgn file, make sure to set language to “Pascal”, so that you get the proper syntax highlighting for:

• game headers
• different types of braces (for annotations and variations)
• move numbers

I never programmed (and probably never will) in Pascal, but this nice little similarity between syntaxes between PGN and Pascal comes really handy!

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").

Chess Position Trainer - Study and Practice Chess Openings

 The video shows how to 
- review and import a repertoire in Chess Position Trainer 4.0
- train against an existing repertoire, from a specific position
- review statistics to see how well you know your repertoir
I use Slav exchange for Black to illustrate the tool's main capabilities.

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).

Changes to Chess Publishing in the Past 10 years

10 years ago I was actively involved in writing chess articles for Canadian chess magazine (it was called “En Passant” at the time). As I was going through my old articles I started thinking of what changed in the world of chess publishing in the past 10 years:

• Computer engines have become much stronger, so most analysis absolutely must be checked with them
• six piece endgame table bases have been developed, which does have an impact on a lot of my articles – since I focused on endgames
• Paper books is not the only format in which chess materials are distributed. Many chess materials are published as free and commercial videos and on web sites. Ebooks have really taken off with most chess books published today also being available in digital format. 
• The way I am creating this blog post is actually by talking into a microphone and then the computer converts my speech into text, even though it does require a lot of correction
• The magazine for which I wrote is no longer sent out by mail to all members of Canadian chess federation and instead is also available online

10 years ago the amount of information available seemed overwhelming, and this is even more true today. Good information and study materials are still in high demand - quality was important 10 years ago and it is still very important now. Reviewing the analysis and commentary that I created 10 years ago it is easy to spot some mistakes, but we do live in a different world today…

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!