What is the best chess playing software available for the PC right
now. I know that best is kinda vague, but here is what I need:

* Strong playing strength
* Good analysis mode
* Easy and intuitive GUI
* Excellent opening book
* Low cost
* Stable (won't crash)
* Reasonable copy protection scheme

Thanks,

BigKhat

On 18 May 2004 10:04:25 -0700, (BigKhat) wrote:

What is the best chess playing software available for the PC right
now. I know that best is kinda vague, but here is what I need:

* Strong playing strength
* Good analysis mode
* Low cost
* Stable (won't crash)
* Reasonable copy protection scheme
* Excellent opening book

I think Crafty fulfills all these. It won't give you cutesy
annotations but can be used to explore alternative lines quite easily
and is very strong in finding long combinations as well as endgame
tactics (even without the tablebases). It costs $0 so whatever you
decide I'd say it's worth checking out.

* Easy and intuitive GUI

Some people can't stand XBoard/WinBoard, but I like it and even the
command-line interface to Crafty is simple and above-all
well-documented.

ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/
http://www.tim-mann.org/crafty.html
http://crafty.dsi.internet2.edu/

--
King's Gambit - http://kingsgambit.blogspot.com
Chess problems, tactics, analysis and more.

On 18 May 2004 10:04:25 -0700, (BigKhat) wrote:

What is the best chess playing software available for the PC right
now. I know that best is kinda vague, but here is what I need:

* Strong playing strength
* Good analysis mode
* Easy and intuitive GUI
* Excellent opening book
* Low cost
* Stable (won't crash)
* Reasonable copy protection scheme

I haven't seen it mentioned in this newsgroup all that often, but I
personally like Chessmaster 9000 (the Windows version) a lot. It
fulfills all of the above criteria very nicely, with the possible
exception that the copy-protection requires you to insert one of the
game's 2 CDs every few weeks. There are patches freely available on the
web to circumvent this, and although I absolutely deplore software
piracy in all it's guises, I also don't think software publishers like
Ubisoft should be allowed to get away with inconveniencing genuine
paying customers on such a grand scale. I would therefore encourage
anyone who has actually bought the product to use one of the patches,
and anyone who has stolen the product to try getting a functioning set
of morals!

Chessmaster's engine is reputed to be one of the better ones for being
able to "dumb down" to what I would describe as acceptable (i.e. lower
than GM) levels of play, and I do think it does this rather well, but I
don't own any of the other popular products like Fritz or Shredder to
compare against. Apparently other products have a tendency to play
Super-GM level chess with the occasional obvious blunder thrown in when
set to lower levels of play. Obviously that is very different to how a
human player would play and wouldn't fit my needs very well at all.

I hope this is of some help!

Regards,
Chris
--
Chris Cowley

I really like the training CD (2nd CD) from ChessMaster 9000. I never really looked at it much before until recently when I decided
I wanted to improve my game. I have to say that it is simply amazing. There is so much covered and it is presented well by on the
board visual instruction accompanied by audio, to drills. It covers so many important aspects of the game that if one was to study
this training persistantly, they would have to get better. This has been the best training I have ever seen. I like going to the
database and looking over GM games also. This is all around a very good way to learn the game. Then you can take the knowledge to
the board and play the computer players. There are so many players of differenct levels to choose from that you can easisly find
the right one to play against for a good game. I have other Chess playing programs but none really compare to the whole package
that you get out of ChessMaster. -matt