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ChessBase Reviews |
Last updated 19 January 2005
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CDs, DVDs, Software Part 19
The majority of the disks covered in this article come on DVD rather than CD, so make sure you have the appropriate disk drive in your PC before purchasing them. Most new PCs come with DVD drives as standard nowadays but even if you don’t have one, a DVD drive is relatively cheap and easy to install on any PC. You would simply take out your old CD drive and replace it with the DVD drive. The DVD drives also read CDs so you don’t have to have both in your PC. The first two disks from ChessBase in this issue cover openings.
How To Play The Queen’s Gambit - Mr. Kasparov Series No. 1 By Gary Kasparov
This DVD has the big advantage that you don’t need to have any other ChessBase products to use it as it comes with its own ChessBase reader. In fact you don’t even need to have a PC to use it. The DVD will play on a standard DVD player so you can view the films as a series of lectures. You simply select the chapter you wish to see from the menu which appears on your TV screen. Viewing on the TV also has the advantage that you can use subtitles, in various languages, if you find it difficult to follow Gary’s accent, which I must add I didn’t find a problem. The chapters cover:
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As you can see, the DVD contains more than three hours of first-class private tuition. At times Gary’s delivery of the variations can be a bit fast to keep up with, but you can always replay them. Those using a PC can follow the variation using the reader and can replay the games from the database on the DVD. Selling for under £15, this has to be one of the best value DVDs around. I would hate to think what Gary would charge for a private three hour tuition booking.
PC System requirements: PC minimum 233 Mhz and 32 MB RAM. Recommended 1 Ghz, 256 MB, Windows 98 SE,ME,2000, or XP, DVD drive, Sound card, Windows Media player 9 or higher.
The ABC Of The King’s Indian By Andrew Martin
Unlike the previous DVD, this one will not play on a standard DVD/TV combination, but in all other respects it uses the same format of lectures. Andrew Martin delivers the lectures at a slightly slower rate than some of the Kasparov's, so I found this DVD much easier to follow.
The information in the lectures is divided into 22 chapters, an introduction and closing remarks, with commentary on 14 games in between as well as systems. Martin aims to look at both classical and modern games to paint a picture of the current state of play in the King’s Indian and look towards the future. He has put a lot of his own analysis into the presentations and does an admirable job in achieving his aims. Anyone using this DVD will come away with a sound understanding of the important strategies of the King’s Indian Defence.
Right Decisions By Jacob Aagaard & Esben Lund
Ok this it must be said is a mammoth work CD since it contains around 4000 test positions. They are divided into 5 chapters:
- Exercises to help you spot opportunities (200 positions)
- Positions for calculation (89 positions)
- Endgame studies (200 studies)
- Pawn endings (75 pawn endings taken from games)
- Positions for playing out (30 positions you can play out against Friz8)
The user of this CD will gain the most if they are willing to put in the work and spend some time analysing each position to find the answer before looking at the author's excellent answers and comments. I can’t say that the test positions are easy, in fact I would say they can be quite difficult. No pain no gain!
System requirements: PC minimum 233 Mhz and 64 MB RAM., Windows 98 SE,ME,2000, or XP, DVD drive, Sound card, Windows Media player 9 or higher.
Junior 9 By Amir Ban & Shay Bushinsky
Junior9 by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky is the reigning computer chess world champion in all categories. Junior is different from all other programs in its search strategies and evaluation function. This gives the program a very distinctive style of play. The special strength of Junior is its understanding of compensation. This makes the program n extraordinarily effective tool for analysing sharp and dynamic positions, especially those involving the sacrifice of material. It is the program that is most likely to correctly understand the compensation involved, both in the execution of a sacrifice and the defence against it.
The CD contains a one-hour interview with the author of Junior, Amir Ban, who explains in clear and lucid terms the way his program works. Amir also tells us how a chess program is developed, and how Junior came about its unique playing style. His goal is to generate a new and better understanding of chess, not just a program that is more efficient at beating rival products. With this CD you also get 1 year's access to the ChessBase web server.
System requirements: Pentium PC and 32 MB RAM. Recommended 1 Ghz, 256 MB, Windows 98 SE,ME,2000, or XP, CD drive and Mouse.
Mega Database 2005 By ChessBase
Mega 2005 is ChessBase’s flagship database of exclusive annotated material. It contains more than 2.9 million games from 1530 to 2004 in the highest ChessBase quality standard. 57,000 games contain commentary from top players, with ChessBase opening classification with more than 100,000 key positions, direct access to players, tournaments, middlegame themes, and endgames. This is the largest top-class annotated database in the world. The most recent games in the database are from the middle of November 2004. Mega 2005 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 183,000 entries, it made sense to use an adapted playerbase which includes about 179,000 names. Doing this, the photo database was extended as well to contain 22,700 pictures now.
I can almost hear a few people saying they can get the games for free from places like TWIC. True, but that means you have to import a lot of small databases and then the games wouldn’t be fully indexed unless you create the indexes in your own database. You also wouldn’t have the playerbase that comes with this DVD. All in all considering the work that ChessBase put into producing this database it has to be great considered value for money.
Systems requirements: Pentium PC, Win 98/ME/XP, 16 MB Ram, DVD-Rom Drive. ChessBase 9, ChessBase 8.0, ChessBase 7.0, Fritz7, Fritz 8. If you want to store everything on your hard disk drive you will also need 1 GB of space (821 Mb for the database alone). Of course you don’t need to store Mega 2005 on your hard drive as you can simple access it from your DVD drive.
ChessBase 9 By ChessBase
I won’t spend a lot of time here on ChessBase 9 as I plan to do the usual separate articles on the DataBase Software program. The following paragraph is the announcement ChessBase made about new features. I have added a few comments in italics in brackets.
New in ChessBase 9.0 are: new database browser, hyperthreading support (In layman's terms support to allow your processor to do more than one task at once, more efficiently), integrated player index, tournament index, source index, annotator index and team Index, new opening key layout, automatic opening reference, new HEUMAS (Heuristic Move Assistant, game history (this could be really handy for Correspondence Players), fast real 3D, board supported (The extreme 3D (X3D) mode looks very impressive), threat animation (Bear in mind that the longer you take between playing through moves the longer the chess engine gets to analyse any given position and identify any threats), improved search, Chess Media System (teaching videos with synchronized chess boards) integrated, improved correspondence chess features and much more.
Comes with a subscription to the PlayChess server. System Requirements: - Win 98, 300 Mhz, 64 Mb Ram, IE6, DVD-ROM. Recommended Win XP, 1 GHz or better, 256 Mb Ram, Windows Media Player 9, New Fast Graphics Card for fast 3D board.