Get a Fritz 7 or Fritz 8 This program is absolutely essential for the
serious tournament player. Fritz will not only analyze your games. It will
annotate them and give you the tools to do your own custom annotation with
the assistance of the fritz engine. You can also add game variations from
one of the other databases you have in fritz into your very own games to see
how your play varied from the games of the grandmasters. The fritz database
utility alone is worth the price of purchase.

"john" wrote in message
...
I have just joined a local club for some OTB games and want to prepare for
my weekly matches. I know some of my opponents always play the same
opening
and have been recording the games. How best do I go about creating a
database of the games and where I made my mistakes plus what my best
option
was in each game. Creating databases are not something I know a lot about
so
what arre the basics and which software is most commonly used.
John.

ChessBase light (and even the most recent full Chessbase 8, which is over 3
years old) are not needed if you have fritz with its wonderful database
utilities.


"DDEckerslyke" wrote in message
...
"john" wrote in message
...
I have just joined a local club for some OTB games and want to prepare
for
my weekly matches. I know some of my opponents always play the same
opening
and have been recording the games. How best do I go about creating a
database of the games and where I made my mistakes plus what my best
option
was in each game. Creating databases are not something I know a lot
about
so
what arre the basics and which software is most commonly used.

Chessbase Light is free, or at least it was when I downloaded it a couple
of
years ago, from chessbase.com. AFAICS it's got bells, whistles, and
GoFaster
stripes. I'm not sure what more Chessbase UnLight does, maybe it makes
great
coffee. Also if you can't figure out how to use it you can ask here, as I
have a couple of times recently.

BTW there isn't always a best option, just whatever fits the way you play
(I
just learned that from LCMBM), but I'm sure you knew that :-)

cheers

dd

"ÿëѤ ²°°³" wrote in message
. ca...
ChessBase light (and even the most recent full Chessbase 8, which is over
3
years old) are not needed if you have fritz with its wonderful database
utilities.

Is it downloadable for free? Is CB Light?

"CeeBee" wrote in message
. 6.67...
"DDEckerslyke" wrote in rec.games.chess.misc:


Is CB Light?

As is as cb can be...

BTW CBLight has some serious setbacks when preparing opening repertoire -
let alone the fact that by now it's stone old. In that case I would turn
to
CA Light.

But the most important drawback is the 7999 game limit; a kings gambit
accepted selected from an 8000 games database won't give you much (as goes
for CA Light).

If you want to prepare seriously the database functionality coming with
Fritz isn't enough. It's good for maintaining game collection, searching
games and positions, but opening preparation possibilities by a program
like CB8 are much more advanced, ranging from opening reports, refined
opening book statistics, player dossiers, to advanced database search
results not available under the Fritz GUI.

Tell me, what "advanced database search" features does CB8 have that Fritz 7
or 8 doesn't?

"ÿëѤ ²°°³" wrote in
rec.games.chess.misc:


Tell me, what "advanced database search" features does CB8 have that
Fritz 7 or 8 doesn't?



In the search filter separate extensive material search, manoeuvres search,
as well as material search and manoeuvres search under the positions tab,
(opening) repertoire search, furthermore in-program online database search,
customable opening report from any position, customable player opening
dossier, move counts and accompanying statistics search (not the database
statistics but the "search for position-statistics") , extra search-and-
sort criteria like tournaments, annotator, sources, and extra keys, like
openings and general themes, extensive sort options for quicker retrieval
of games, quick database game scanning possibilities, and certainly more I
forgot to mention.
Of course there's also the more extensive book (search) options.

--
CeeBee


Uxbridge: "By God, sir, I've lost my leg!"
Wellington: "By God, sir, so you have!"


Google CeeBee @ www.geocities.com/ceebee_2

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 23:53:17 +0100, "john"
wrote:

I have just joined a local club for some OTB games and want to prepare for
my weekly matches. I know some of my opponents always play the same opening
and have been recording the games. How best do I go about creating a
database of the games and where I made my mistakes plus what my best option
was in each game. Creating databases are not something I know a lot about so
what arre the basics and which software is most commonly used.
John.



John,

You have a number of options available depending on what you want to
do with the database, how much you are willing to spend and your level
of sohpistication wrt downloading and installing programs from the
web.

Your options also depend on what OS you run - Windows has the most
available software; Linux and Mac OS have much less. I assume that you
want to run the software on Windows.

You mentioned two things that you want to use the database for:
1) Storing your games with your own annotations.
2) Storing games for your openents because they play the same openings
again and again.

I'll sugest two other features that you may want:
3) The ability to have a strong program analyze your games to augment
your own annotations
4) Inclusion of a large game collection that you can search to find
out what strong players did in games that reached particular positions
(e.g positions from past games of your upcoming oppents). That way
you might find improved ways to play against if you reach those
positions in your games later.

You should probably also take a look at the Technical Notes column
written by Steve Lopez about how to use a chess database and analysis
engine (they are available at www.chessbaseusa.com or the the support
page at www.chessbase.com). Steve writes articles for using Chessbase
and Fritz, but most of the information applies to other programs. The
articles on what a Chess database is for and what you can do with one
are particluarly informative.

If you are comfortable downloading and installing software I would
recommend getting Scid ( http://scid.sourceforge.net/ ) as the
database program and crafty ( ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/ ) as an
analysis engine. Install them and configure Scid to use crafty for
analysis.

There are database/game-analysis programs that are more turn key; you
buy the CD, install the program and they just work. However, they
cost money. Chessbase 8 goes for about $130 if you shop around.
Chessbase includes a large game collection and an older version of
Frittz (5.32) as part of the package. You can get Fritz 7 for around
$30. (Strictly speaking Fritz is not a exactly a database program, but
it has the functionality you need). The lastest version of Fritz (8)
goes for a bit more (around $50). Fritz does not usuallyl come with
as large a game collection as Chessbase 8, but sometimes you can find
deals with vendors that include large game collections. Also, you can
download millions of games from the internet to build your own
collection.

Convekta offers Chess Assistant 7.1 for about $90 it includes a large
(1.7+ million games) collection, Master (or better) strength analysis
programs and some fairly sophisticated searching and openign training
features,

Both Chessbase and Chess Assistant have lite versions that can be
downloaded for free. The main restriction on these versions is a
limit on the number of games you can store per database (8000). If
you don't actually need capability 4 above then each of these is worth
considering.

Mike Ogush

On Wed, 13 Aug 2003 21:32:21 GMT, "ÿëѤ ²°°³"
wrote:


"DDEckerslyke" wrote in message
...
"ÿëѤ ²°°³" wrote in message
. ca...
ChessBase light (and even the most recent full Chessbase 8, which is
over
3
years old) are not needed if you have fritz with its wonderful database
utilities.

Is it downloadable for free? Is CB Light?


Actually, yes! Fritz 7, CB8, CB7, CB Light, etc are all downloadable for
free after installing kazaa @ http://www.kazaa.com/us/index.htm



CM Light is downloadable from chessbase.com; Similarly Chess Assistant
lite can be downloaded from Convekta. There are many other chess tools
that the authors make freely available).

When you download Fritz 7, CB 8, CB7 from kazaa or similar sites you
are participating in theft of intellectual property.

Mike Ogush