Improve Chess Openings Now - Studying Rauzer Sicilian with Chess Positio...

This chess software review will show you how to learn and practice chess openings without risking rating points! More about Chess Position Trainer on my blog: http://roman-chess.blogspot.ca/search/label/Software%20-%20Chess%20Position%20Trainer

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!

Chess Position Trainer 5 Manual Available

99.9 % of the content on this blog consists of my original posts, but occasionally it makes sense to share news from other websites that I subscribe to. Today's update comes from ChessPosition Trainer website:Chess Position Trainer 5 Manual Available

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:

Chess Position Trainer 4 – Public Beta is out

After much anticipation, the new version of Chess Position Trainer is getting rolled out to the masses, as the program’s author announced on his blog.

First Impressions:
- It installed successfully on my Windows 7 – 64 bit machine.
- I was able to import my opening repertoire from a pgn file, and then navigate through the moves.
- The number of buttons and widgets seems to have increased dramatically since version 3, and the screenshot above shows the “Beginner Mode”!
- The “statistics” panel seems very promising. For example, after I went through one line, it showed me visually how much more of my repertoire I still have to study/review. 15 Positions reviewed, 17042 – not reviewed! A picture shows I still have a long way to go, to put it mildly…

This tool is sure to be a great New Year’s gift to chess players who use software for practising their opening skills.

Chess Position Trainer – Show Novelties

Once you created an opening repertoire in Chess Position Trainer (or imported it from elsewhere), you can cross-reference it against the database of games that you played. Here is a little walkthrough of how to use this feature.

Typically I play a lot of games on ICC, which stores all my games in a PGN file.

By using “show novelties” menu, I get a prompt for a pgn file, and then – a list of games:

Clicking on each game takes me to the position in which the game departed from my repertoire! The tool comments on what I should have played, according – to my own opening preparation

Apparently castling is premature here, but, alas, I forgot how exactly to deal with this piece sacrifice in the dragon, and did not play Nb3.

The new version of Chess Position Trainer is coming out soon, I can’t wait!

Chess Position Trainer – test your opening knowledge!

I have written a fair bit about how you’d want to be careful about choosing the openings that you play and opening preparation in general. But how do you actually remember the multitude of lines that constitute your repertoire? If you carefully analyzed certain openings, and your repertoire consists of your original ideas – memorization likely won't be an issue. But if you never played a line before, and barely can think of a couple of plans – as soon as a position on move 10 comes up on the board, you'll realize pretty soon that:

• The devil is in the details – understanding positional ideas is great, but you still need to play specific moves to implement those ideas
• Move order matters
• some positions look similar, but the move you remembered and thought should be played in this particular position is actually good in a different sub-variation, but is inappropriate in this particular case

To test and refine my understanding of an opening – I usually play blitz games on ICC, look at them later and see whether I deviated from my own repertoire, or whether there is actually a gap in my repertoire that this game revealed. While practice games are super-useful, that type of training has some limitations:

• you have no control over what opponents will throw at you (you really did not want to test your knowledge of 1…b6 !)
• in the rush of a blitz game - you may not focus too much on playing the move that you had prepared (I already spent 30 seconds on the opening, I’d better move something quickly)
• once the game has ended - you also need to have the stamina to go back and compare your moves against what you had planned in the preparation

So there is a need for a special tool to test your opening knowledge! I have always admired the developer who put up a ton of effort into creating a free tool that lets you manage your opening repertoire and then practice it in a training mode – Chess Position Trainer. It always felt like a tool I would want to write myself if I had the skills and time. As it often happens with free software - the author had to fill the gap that no other free or commercial application would cover sufficiently for him.

However I have not used it for a while as it seemed that all my data was already in pgn and chessbase format, and my opening repertoire existed outside of Chess Position Trainer ecosystem. What was even worse – my repertoire had too many gaps (it still does), so I spent the last year going through books, databases and my old games, deciding what I should play against such and such line. Today I imported the opening repertoire I had created with Chessbase Light into Chess position Trainer, and here we go – I can practice my openings again!

In the training mode – the UI looks like this:

Training mode

A few points I like about its training mode:

• games are thrown at you relatively randomly
• Your progress is tracked (I have not dug into the details)
• The board is large and I like its simple look – often underestimated but very important, but some $100 packages got that part wrong.
• You’re told immediately whether you made a correct move (“correct” means – the move you yourself defined to be in your repertoire)

Sometimes it keeps throwing the same line at you until you actually know enter all the correct moves:

Training Mode is a pretty fundamental part of Chess Position Trainer – you can tell that from looking at training options (that’s a lot of Tabs!):

I would agree with what Stefan (the developer) wrote in this blog post – "this time I have already at hand a chess tool to study my material."

Outside of the Opening Training mode – the UI looks like this. This is one of the most well designed user interfaces for a chess program I’ve seen so far. It sounds silly, but buttons are large and convenient to press. It feels that the author actually uses this program himself, so he tried to make things easy for himself – and therefore, for any other chess player using his product. At the core of the software - the focus is as much on positions as it is on the moves, which makes sense for opening preparation.