ChessBase Reviews

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ChessBase 7 Part 3

Thanks to all who have let me know how much they have been enjoying these articles. As a result I will be trying to produce a few more covering various aspects of the ChessBase products. The range of quality products from ChessBase is growing so this is quite a big subject. For example, there are Endgame and Opening CDs, training CDs such as Gambit Lexicon and King's Indian Structure with f5-f4, and of course the playing/analysis programs Fritz532, Junior5, Nimzo732 and Hiarcs732. I plan to have a look at each of these in future articles but for the moment I want to continue on the theme of how I use the ChessBase 7 program in helping with my correspondence games.

Obviously the program is being used throughout the year to store and update my games but at other times I find myself putting it to far greater use. For example, I have just been asked to represent Scotland in the 6th European Team Championship. A great honour, but a daunting task as I must be one of the weaker players involved. Past experience has taught me the importance of opening preparation. Some openings work well for you, others don't. In addition, you may have had reasonable results with a particular opening system yet found that a particular player always gets the better of you with it. Here in lies the first clue as to what needs to be done with ChessBase before the event even begins.

Step one is to research your opponents. Armed with the pairing list I started to hunt through databases, of which I have a few, to try and find games that my opponents had played. The number of games that you can find is amazing. Games collections come on CD and large numbers of games can be found on the internet. I even enlisted the help of friends such as Tom Thomson just in case they had some games in their databases, which I didn't. Ok, I didn't manage to find games for all my opponents, but I did end up finding several hundred games and these covered most of them.

With this information I can start to get a feel for how my opponents might play against me. For example, one of my opponents is Bo Jäderholm from Finland. I will have the Black pieces against Bo so obviously I wanted to concentrate on games where he was White. One thing which struck me instantly was that Bo seems to exclusively play 1.e4. The next thing I noticed was that he also seems to do extremely well when his opponents play the Ruy Lopez.

In fact out of 18 games he had won 15 and drawn 3. Perhaps this is an opening to avoid. This may not be the case if you like playing the Ruy Lopez and enjoy good results with it. There were also other openings such as Sicilians, so I have plenty to help me decide what I might want to play. A word of caution here, some correspondence players tend to publish a lot of games they have won. This doesn't necessarily mean that they win most of their games with a particular opening, but may mean that few of their losses have managed to get into print because their opponents were not inclined towards annotating their games.

In any case, it is then time to get a better feel for your opponent by playing through their games. If you have a good idea what you will play then you might want to simply concentrate on one particular opening. If you have more time then you might want to play through all their games.

Playing through the games is very simple in ChessBase. You simply load the game and click on the forward arrow to progress through the game a move at a time. The game appears on a diagram board on the screen and you can follow the moves very easily. There are two useful ChessBase facilities, which can help your study of games. The first is to do an editorial annotation, particularly useful if you have a good quality database such as Mega Database 99. This function will have ChessBase add games that have followed the game you are looking at, as annotations, into the loaded game. You can then instantly see what top players have played in the line that you are looking at.

The second is to switch on one or more of the analysis engines to see what they come up with as you play through the game. One engine can even be locked at a particular position for more concentrated analysis. Whilst you continue to play through the game another engine can continue to analyse the current position. When you return to the locked position you will be able to see what the analysis engine has come up with after a longer think. The big advantage of using the analysis engines is that you can quickly spot where errors may have occurred in the game.

It may be that a player has won a game because of a blunder by their opponent even though they had an inferior position. The analysis engine can help you work through openings to get a feel for what can and can't be played. The analysis may not always be perfect, there are plenty of examples of positions where a computer has totally missed the point, but if you are studying a new opening it can be very useful at times. Having had a look at your opponent's games you might then want to play through some games from your database, on particular openings, that GMs have played.

All of this can lead to a lot of hours of study, but with luck you should be better prepared for your opponent. I have done this before. In the past I have used ChessBase to research for example 1.e4 e6 2.Qe2, which hardly appears in any books. I managed to find thousands of games and as a result I felt I was better prepared than some of my opponents. It got me a nice few wins against opponents who I considered to be better players than myself.

There are those who will have instantly spotted the flaw in studying an opponent's games and perhaps finding you have wasted your time if they decide to play something totally different. Oh dear what if Bo decides to play 1.d4. Well, I happen to believe that you can't really unlearn something. Your hours of work must teach you something that will eventually be of use in some other game. ChessBase is a tool and it should be used to help you develop your skills.