Socks

hehe, I thought the same, until I saw Nakamura when he was I think 17 years old beat an international master 15 games in a row on ICC, and some of the games he started by moving both his rook pawns up 2 spots... Kid is crazy good.. But mind you they're fast games, probably 3 minutes a side.. But they make it seem like an eternity sometimes. You're right though, in a real 1.5 hour per side tournament game, they'd never get away with it.

So you're pretty much on the right track with the software. Fritz is an engine, like Crafty, Junior, Hiarcs, Shredder, Rybka, etc. The engine is just the brain inside the game, all it does is think. The interface, features and options are from a program called Chessbase. When you get Fritz, Junior or any of the other above engines, you'll get a basic version of Chessbase to play in. If you own two engines, you just have the same program, but with 2 engines you can load. They think differently, so you'll get different analysis from them. Crafty is free, so it's in there too. I used to run a Crafty computer on Chess.net back in the day, I had a PC that would just sit there and play people all day, and I could watch or just let it play, etc.

For the serious player, it's really cool to have the full version of Chessbase, which is pretty expensive, and then the engine of your choice. The full version is waaaay more advanced, and if you get the upgrades to it, it's a fuckin monster. One of the biggest most complex computer programs around I'm sure. Player databases, decades and decades of games from top tournaments, stats on all those games, custom opening books, you can even have it build an opening book from your database of games, up to move 8 let's say.

Chessmaster is good for the casual player, but it leaves so much of the game out of it. I don't think it's the best way to go if you really like the game and spend time with it. Maybe you'll never beat Chessmaster, but whatever, that's not the point. You can set Fritz to play as strongly as you play, and it will learn over the games you play against it to adapt its strength to yours too.

But the real advantage is the learning you can do, in a fun way that's not reading a book etc. You can just pick an opening for example and look through the tree of what moves players about 2500 make... Based on the database of the 4,000,000 games that comes with the mega database.

Not cheap though, you have to be into it. There's also educational addons, for like $25-30euros, teaching you about various parts of the game from grandmasters. You just need Fritz for those. Honestly if you tried Fritz, you wouldn't go back, it IS chessbase too, just a dumbed down version. You can analyze, setup matches from positions between engines, all that.. It's like 75% of the way there.

My computers have spent many a night analyzing the games I've played, thinking for 30 minutes per move. It's cool to see what you should have done and why, or where you left yourself open to a combination and didn't notice, etc. I don't think I ever would have done any of that with Chessmaster (hell, anyone remember Battle Chess for Amiga? hehe)

Fritz:

http://www.chessbase.com/shop/produc...58&user=&coin=

Chessbase 10 full:

http://www.chessbase.com/shop/produc...93&user=&coin=

The database thing I was talking about, same site as above:

Mega Database 2009
The exclusive annotated database. Contains more than 4 millions games from 1560 to 2008 in the highest ChessBase quality standard. 62,000 games contain commentary from top players, with ChessBase opening classification with more than 100,000 key positions, direct access to players, tournaments, middlegame themes, endgames. The largest topclass annotated database in the world. The most recent games of the database are from the middle of November 2008. Mega 2009 also features a new edition of the playerbase. As usual, this is where most of the work was done. As the player index now contains already more than 220,000 entries, it made sense to use an adapted playerbase which includes about 248,000 names. Doing this, the photo database was extended as well to contain 31,000 pictures now.