ChessBase Reviews

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CDs, DVDs, Software Part 4

This CD is suitable for any Pentium PC running Windows 95,98,2000 or ME and comes with its own reader so you don't even have to have a copy of ChessBase.

The Chigorin Defence by Martin Breutigam is the latest CD from ChessBase in their rapidly growing Openings range. The Chigorin Defence comes about from the move order 1.d4 d5 2.c4 Nc6 and may not be the most popular because many players fear the fact that the c7 pawn is blocked.

The opening may be less well analysed compared to many of today's openings but it offers plenty of scope for new ideas to be discovered. This above all else will make it a worthwhile choice for the correspondence player. Strong players who have used this opening include Efim Bogoljubow, Edgar Colle, Savielly Xavier Tartakower, Boris Spassky, Tony Miles and more recently Alexander Morozevich.

The main instructional part of the CD contains 7 text files and 93 games which the author uses for instruction. The text is well set out and contains good links for easy use. This is helped because the author has included a section on how to use the CD.

A separate database contains 20 training games with 54 training questions between them to help you hone your skills. The CD also contains a database with 4328 games as well as a big tree of all the games. All in all it makes for a very useful teaching aid which is understandable to even those of us who are not Grandmasters.

This CD is suitable for any Pentium PC with 16Mb RAM running Windows 95,98,2000 or ME.

New from ChessBase on the playing program front is Chess Tiger 14 by Christoph Théron. This program may soon become a serious rival to Fritz. Recent years have seen it obtain victories in the French Open Championship in both 1999 and 2000.

One of the improvements in Chess Tiger is that a mobility factor has been added and the engine will now always try to maximise its mobility. Other improvements over previous versions are that the program now knows how to mate with knight and bishop, it can now use Tablebases to improve endgame efficiency, and multi variation mode to allow you to see more than one line of analysis being calculated by the program.

Some of you may remember this position from Magazine 65 (Spring 1999). John Mackie from Australia pointed out that Fritz 5.32 persisted in playing 19.Nxc5 and totally missed the thematic 19.Rxd7! Bxd7 20.Bd3 winning. I pointed out in Magazine 66 that Fritz 5 found 19.Rxd7 on a PII 300 after about 15 minutes but Junior 5 failed to find it even after 30 minutes.

I now have a slightly faster machine and the good news is that ChessTiger14 took less than a minute to come up with the winning move as its preferred choice. Fritz 6 also found 19.Rxd7 to be the best move but took about 5 minutes to reach the same conclusion. Clearly Chess Tiger appears to be a much more attacking orientated program as can be seen from the fact that it quickly considers moves which other programs may initially consider inferior or may not consider at all.

An even better factor of this CD is that you get two engines for the price of one. The CD also has Gambit Tiger 2.0 included. Gambit Tiger is a much more attacking orientated program and quite happily goes on the king hunt meaning it produces moves other engines wouldn't play. Admittedly the engine has been improved on from previous versions as it doesn't now follow lines which would prove futile. For those who like attacking chess you will love this engine. The CD includes a 319900 game database and Endgame Tablebases.

ChessBase Magazine 81 is a real bargain this time. Rather than one you get two CDs. The normal CD contains a main database with 1428 games and 12 texts containing Tournament reports. The largest set of games (258) are those from the FIDE knock-out world championship. Of these 96 are annotated, amongst others also by the winner Vishy Anand. tournaments and matches on the CD include Delhi/Teheran, Wijk aan Zee, Budapest RWE, Donetsk, Linares Anibal Open, Hastings, Gothenburg, Rumanian Team Championship, Israel Men's Championship, Elbow Beach Schach Festival and York.

As well as the usual tactics, strategy and endgame databases theory this issue covers A18 English Mikenas System, B11 The Boleslavsky Gambit and D50 The Canal Gambit. There are also 17 Multimedia reports.

The second contains a new players' encyclopedia which replaces the one you received with your ChessBase 8.0 program. The encyclopedia has been substantially improved and enhanced. There are around 20,000 new player entries and more than 1,100 new pictures, including a lot of recent shots of the top players.

There is some other good news: the photos have been converted to the JPG format, which compresses the pictures (and the file size) dramatically, without losing any of the quality in the process. Replacing the older encyclopedia with the new larger one will actually save you 400 MB of hard disk space.