Hi David:

5. Be3 was weak but not the losing move, c3 or Nc3 would be better. 5. c3
prepares an eventual d4 for a Ruy Lopez type position. It is too early to
decide where the bishop belongs.
After 5. Ng5 d5 6. ed5 Na5 7. Bb5+ c6 8. dc6 bc6 9. Ba4 Bg4 we have a
line in the 2 Knights defense where black has some compensation for his
pawn. Given the way you
played the rest of the game, 5. Ng5 is not the move for you!
9. Nh2?? was a real lemon, 9. hg4 Bg4 is much better.
11. Nd2 was also very bad, Nd5 drives his Q back.
13. Kg1??, the losing move, 13. f4 was necessary. After that, there is not
much point in looking farther. In fact, black should have won more quickly.
You allowed Black to sieze the initiative and disrupt your K-side because
you did not play "in the spirt of the opening" as they say. If you want to
play slowly/more positionally, try the Ruy Lopez or 1. d4 or 1. c4. While
one should not try to memorize lots of opening moves, you do need to
understand the general plan associated with any opening you play.
Also, ChessBase is a games database, not an "engine" that plays chess
although it does include an engine (Crafty I think). Fritz8 from ChessBase
is very strong playing program and has more database functions than most
amateur players need. The program gets loaded from a CD onto your hard disk
but you do need to re-insert the CD once in a while. Check with ChessBase or
ChessBaseUSA to be sure that it will run on your setup.

Geoff


"Dr. David Kirkby" m wrote
in message om...
Sorry I posted this in another newsgroup earlier, but on reflection
that was not the best choice.

I played a game as white in which I made a real mess of things. The
PGN file can be found at

http://www.g8wrb.org/chess/paupau.pgn

I've analysed the game using the free open-source chess engine
'crafty'. The results of the analysis can be found at:

http://www.g8wrb.org/chess/paupau.pgn.html

In case it's not obvious, a couple of lines from 'crafty' such as

({12:-0.20} 5. Be3 Na5 6. Na3 Be7 7. O-O O-O 8....
({12:+0.72} 5. Ng5 d5 6. exd5 Na5 7. O-O Nxc4 8....

Indicates to an analysis depth of 12, the 5th move Be3 gave white a
disadvantage (-0.20 pawns) compared to Ng5 which would have been an
advantage of 0.72 pawns. Since I played Be3, I clearly did not choose
the best move.

Would anyone with 'chessbase' (preferably a few different versions
from a few different people) be kind enough to analyse the game and
give their results? I hope this analysis would useful to not just
myself, but others too, since a comparision of different programs for
analysis can only be in everyone's best interest.

The analysis was done at 120 s per move (i.e. 60 s for white, 60 s for
black). The machine was rather an odd-ball, being a Sun Ultra 80
running 4 x 450 MHz CPUs each with 4 MB of cache ram. My guess is that
the performance would be similar to a Pentium running at 1.5 GHz or
so, although I've never compared resuls with this machine to a
Pentium. Neither have I optimised the code in any way.

You can see the analysis by 'crafty' thinks I played the wrong move at
5, when I played Be3 (which put me 0.21 pawns down) rather than the
Ng5, which would have given me an advantage of 0.72 pawns. It also
thinks I played move 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 .. wrong, but by this point I
was in a real mess anyway.