ChessBase Reviews

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CDs, DVDs, Software Part 7

Secrets of the English Chess School by Daniel King

Daniel King’s CD has to be one on the best strategy CDs out there at the moment. The English GM wrote a number of articles for ChessBase Magazine. There was a total of 29 articles, and in this CD they are finally brought together. Each article contains informative games with plenty of diagrams and a thorough commentary. The author's humour and natural teaching talent make each article a valuable tool to anyone wishing to improve their chess talents.

Daniel has organised the articles into 8 themes covering The King, The Queen, Minor Pieces, Pawns, Attack, Tactics, Openings ideas and Mixed. Daniel King is pretty enthusiastic about his work and it shows in these articles where he goes into a great deal of depth where some authors might have wrapped thing up after a couple of games.

Fritz 7

Fritz 7 finally hit the shops and I have to admit that I was not disappointed. Once again it has the ability to completely thrash me in a game of chess. The one saving grace is that you can set it up to give you hints. The commentary explaining why the move you just played may not be the best can be quite instructive.

The program plays a better defensive game than its predecessor and its knowledge about pawn structures has been completely rewritten. The big new feature with Fritz 7 is the FREE access to online play via the ChessBase sever. If you have a few minutes to spare you can simply use Fritz 7 to connect to the internet and play against opponents from all over the world. Unfortunately in my first game I lost. I played my move and sat back waiting for a reply from my opponent merrily thinking I might win on time if he didn't get a move on. Eventually I noticed that the connection had been lost so I clicked on the appropriate button to claim the game. I later found out my opponent had claimed the game before me, despite having a worse position, and had got the win.

Queen's Gambit with 5.Bf4 by Rustem Dautov

Anyone who is thinking of playing 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Nf3 Be7 5.Bf4 will find this CD extremely beneficial. Dautov has split the contents into 13 parts using a total 3657 games of which 255 are well annotated. 81 of these games are annotated by the author himself. The text files contain a description of the strategic ideas for each variation to enable the reader to work effortlessly through the important lines.

Mega Database 2002 by ChessBase

The latest edition Mega Database contains 2,018,425 games which is over 300,000 more than its predecessor. Once again, this is a top quality CD and 45,000 of the games contain commentary from top players. Games range from the year 1530 up to November 2001. This year's edition includes a second CD which is a new edition of the playerbase for use with ChessBase 8. The playerbase now has 130,00 names and 13,000 photos.

Openings Encyclopaedia 2002 by ChessBase

The last Openings Encyclopaedia was released in 1999 but the latest edition contains a lot more games. There are over 1.1 million compared to around 470,000 on the previous CD. The encyclopaedia features the complete coverage of all opening sectors, offering an optimal start for opening training. Many top players such as Kasparov, Anand, Nunn and Bareev, have contributed to the CD, and there are over 3200 openings surveys. The CD also includes a big tree for a quick overview and statistical access. The CD contains many excellently annotated games and indeed there are over 60,000 games with commentary.

Fritz Powerbook 2002 by ChessBase

This CD contains over 7.6 million opening positions, derived from 630,000 high class tournament games. Along with each position all relevant information is stored relating to the moves played, average grading of players and success and performance results. Letting Fritz have access to the CD will improve its play but most players seem to forget that they can use it to help themselves. When playing through a game if you select the book tab in either Fritz or ChessBase you will be able to see what moves have been played from that position, and with what sort of success. Basically a sort of instant access to an opening encyclopaedia which should help the CC player avoid picking lines that are poor.

Shredder 6 by ChessBase

The Shredder playing program has won the computer World Championship on 4 occasions, including 2001, and is the latest release in the playing program field from ChessBase. The Shredder program has some unique features such as triple brain which is a revolutionary new conception which allows you to use two different engines in parallel, with a special "triple brain" module analysing the results and deciding which engine to follow in the current position.