(drum roll, please)

Chess Assistant.

Why? A lot of factors played into this, but here’s the deal, as the short mad one used to say:

Updates. The plain fact is CA databases are easier to update, especially when, like me, you don’t do updates every single week, but sometimes let a month go by before updating. If I want to do a 5-6 updates from TWIC into CB, for example, I have to download the files, unzip them, open the individual databases and copy them into the main twic database I have here. With CA, I just download the files, go in to CA, hit “Join…” and point the program at the downloaded zip files. It does the rest automatically. Oh, and the program itself is easier to upgrade — you can download the upgrades after purchase, instead of waiting for a package with disc(s). This is important to me since I had a disc from CB that went bad, and it was a month-long hassle that began with the assumption that I was a thief, which, I’ll have to admit, was another factor in the decision (but since most software companies treat their customers like thieves, that doesn’t prove a serious objection). Easily better than CB.

Analysis. CA ships with Deep Rybka, CB with Fritz 6. This one isn’t even close.

Cost. Gotta admit, money is a factor; like I said, GM’s may get a free ride, but I don’t. CA charged $100 to upgrade it along with the 4 million game hugebase. Chessbase wants $140 just for the program. their large database, megabase, is sold separately. It’s at least another $50 to update the megabase.

Does that mean I won’t miss CB? Of course not. I absolutely love the opening report you can build with CB; never saw anything like it anywhere else. But that’s about the only feature of CB I’ll miss. Oh, wait…except for the nice way it lines the test positions I print out up in nice neat columns and rows. CA still hasn’t figured out how to do that; the positions are off by a line or two from one column to the other.

Considering I don’t do a lot of opening reports, and CA10 has now fixed the silly bug that kept it from printing diagrams without moves, there’s no good reason for me to spend twice as much.

Here is my list of the top annoyances and how Chessbase, Chess Assistant, or both, fail to deliver:

1. Illegal Positions. Both allow me to create a position, but neither allow me to create either a fragment of a position or a position that lacks one or both Kings, something that is useful especially when demonstrating the essentials of a tactical sequence or the characteristics of a pawn structure. Chessbase comes the closest, as it will allow me to create such a position in a text file in the database. Maybe it’s just my installation, though, but I am unable to print those positions with the text file to create a handout for my classes. Not all of the classrooms I work have video projectors, and not all of the students have computers, hence an electronic-only version doesn’t cut it. So far, I’ve had to create the positions in the text file, convert the text file to html, then export the text file to RTF, load it into a word processor and copy/paste the diagrams into the word processor (because for some reason known only to CB, it doesn’t export the images). It’s even more tedious than it sounds.
2. Homework Diagrams. This is one that CB does much better than CA. You have to make a training annotation on the first move, but once you do so, you can select a sequence of diagrams, tell CB to “Print Multiple Training” and hey, presto! Out of the printer come pages of diagrams, sans moves, followed by a list of answers for each. But the problem is CB only prints out the first move as the answer, not the entire answer. Give it 6 out of 10 for that. CA can’t do even that much. If you want to do this in CA, you have a few workarounds, but none of them are really practical: You can create a second database of just the positions, without answers, or you can export to an RTF file and delete all the moves before printing, or you can make the answers a variation rather than the main line and print with variations disabled. Eew.
3. Export Graphically Annotated Diagrams. This is a feature that makes me think CB has a much higher estimation of their printed output than I do. CB will only do this directly to the printer. CA will export these diagrams to RTF files as well as print them. Personally, I think CA’s output is friendlier to print publication efforts while CB’s is friendlier to the web, but classroom work is printed. So, yes, CA does this one at an acceptable level.

Full Disclosure: I am affiliated with neither company, but I have much more familiarity with CA than CB, so there may be ways to get CB to do what I want that I have yet to discover. Over the past year or two I’ve used CB more than CA in the classroom because of “print multiple training”, but recently I’ve started to prepare more complete homework packages, and I’m starting to switch back, because of CA’s flexibility.

Why is it that no one really cares enough to do things right? If Chessbase would have just been able to write good HTML (we’ll leave aside the errors in their javascript and CSS) then other people (like me) could take that output and weave it into websites in ways they mightn’t dream of. But no. They’d rather write crap than create something useful. So I have to waste time hacking their output in order to get something fit to post.
Equal Time proviso: Chess Assistant creates only marginally better code. I really don’t understand why.

Our friend sits beside us, looking over our shoulder, and he makes comments on our move selection. What’s the problem with that, I hear you ask? By his very nature, our silicon friend cannot be in doubt. He will offer his commentary, tell us we’re doing well, doing badly, or hanging in there. He’s always got an opinion. And sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s wrong, but he’s never in doubt.

I’m reminded of a line from Douglas Adams: “We demand rigorously defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” It sounds silly, but there’s some point to it. It’s in these areas of doubt and uncertainty that the best chess is often played.

Back in the day, when a human annotator reached a complicated complex position that he couldn’t see the end of, he marked it with the “unclear” symbol. That let players and future analysts know there was something undiscovered there, and it could prove fruitful ground for the player to explore. It was a position either side might hope to make something of.

Our silicon friends today don’t suffer from that sort of humility. Their egos don’t permit them to say “I’m just not able to see this clearly enough to know.” Instead, they cheerfully spout off with an evaluation whenever we ask, whether they can clearly see the answer or not.

This isn’t exclusive to chess. In the financial analysis world, this syndrome was termed “visi-knowing” (after the first really popular spreadsheet application, VisiCalc). It meant you had a detailed financial sheet in front of you, and all the numbers squared up, with a mountain of detail. But, in part because of the detail, it wasn’t clear to the human reading the report just what was actual, and what was fiction.

Correspondence players will tell you, computers will be happily churning along, sure they’re doing alright, until after they’ve arrived in a position they cannot win; they just don’t see their fate coming, even though the human player has been sure for several moves now.

But when we mere mortal OTB players prepare, we take the silicon monster’s word, and close down the line of research, a line we might have followed up on had we not had a friend whose omniscience we relied upon.

Case in point: The Blackmar-Diemer Gambit. No computer likes this opening. Yet it, better than any other opening system I know, exemplifies the phrase “good practical chances.” The positions in it are filled with tactical opportunities for both sides, with complicated play which ensures that at least one side, and quite possibly both, will go horribly wrong.

Yet I once had a computer walk the tree for a 25,000 BDG game database, making the move with the best result for White or Black, depending upon which side was to move. Black won in all variations, meaning no matter what White’s move choice had been, Black had a variation which had resulted in a won game for him. There were plenty of improvements available, though, so for grins I started looking for them (starting in the Teichmann Defence, which a friend assured me held the secret to refuting the BDG).

While I was slogging through there with my silicon friend, I realized something: The likelihood of me, or any of my opponents, finding some of these continuations were practically nil. Some of the “only” moves I was finding were moves only a computer could love. And then came the epiphany.

How many players were crunching away at positions in the BDG, or any other opening, for that matter, and stopped analysing a line because their computer said it slightly favored the other side? How many variations which would have pitted one player’s skill and calculating ability against another have been ignored, because the computer said “it doesn’t work,” whether it actually did or not?

We see draw rates of 55% at the GM level. Maybe this is one reason why. Today those dubious lines go unplayed, even though they might win. I wonder how many future Mikhail Tals are being smothered, because their imagination gets stepped upon by the computer’s verdict of “=”.

And I think back to Kramnik-Kasparov, and I wonder: if the match were being prepared today, would Kramnik have had the courage of his convictions and fly in the face of the silicon beast’s “slightly worse” pronouncements to build his Berlin Walls anyway?

What have we already lost, and what will we lose in the future, because of the computer’s oblivious analytical certainty?

In order to print out the list of diagrams for me to give to my students, CB either insisted I go through the db one position at a time and collect the starting positions into a “position list”, or go through the entire db one position at a time and enter a “training annotation” before every first move. Can you spell tedious, my child? Why they couldn’t just let me print the opening positions, or select a batch of games and move all their opening positions into a diagram list is beyond me.

CA was closer to letting me do that. In fact, it appears that only an implementation bug prevented me from doing it. CA has a “print x moves” (where x is one of those numeric spinners) option for printing games, which allows you to choose how many moves of each will be printed. So I could have a list view of the diagrams I want to print, set “print x moves” to 0, then print. Except the field’s lower limit is set to 1. CA tech support says a fix is on the way.

As for setting up the positions in the first place, the procedure for both is about the same (tell it you want to define a position, empty the board and select pieces from a palette to place on the board. CA has an additional tool, which allows you to to reposition pieces on the board (with CB you have to select the piece from the palette, click the old square and then click the new square). But the CA palette and board is small, and it’s easier to use the larger CB pieces. (That’s part of Fitts’s Law: the larger the target, the easier it is to click on it.)

In fixing errors after creating the position, though, CA knocks CB all hollow. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to edit a position in place. I always had to delete the old position and save a new one (and if the order in the db was important, drag the new one to the old one’s place and fix the sort order). With CA you can edit the position (but if you change the starting location of a piece, it obviously wipes out the moves/annotations). Also, I’d entered 40 positions without giving a result, so CB had the “Line” bit in the results. Since the positions were mates in 1 for white, I thought “1-0″ would be a more appropriate result, so I wanted to change that. I couldn’t find a way in CB to make that change in multiple games other than to make it in each game singly, 40 changes in all. In CA, I could select the games, group them in a list view, and “fill down” that particular field. 40 or 40,000 changes in one operation.

Executive Summary

CB is better than CA for creating test positions, but if you make a mistake in the entry, or if you want to revise the position, and especially if you repeat that mistake many times before first catching it, you’re definitely going to want to be using CA.

CA needs: to fix the “0 move” printing bug, and increase the size of the piece pallete for defining positions.

CB needs: to more readily allow edits of positions. If they keep their current approach, a keyboard macro editor would be terrific. I typed the the sequence “right arrow/control-alt-m/control-v/alt-o/control-r/return/F10″ way too many times to be happy with it. A better approach would be to let me select a batch of games and be able to change any field(s) for all the selected games in one operation, but either fix would be a tremendous improvement on what’s there. CB appears to make the assumption that the user knows what they’re doing, always a dangerous assumption.

1) I may not be cut out to be a chess coach, but I can be a chess teacher. The difference? The amount of time you spend with individual children. I’m finding it personally draining to be talking/teaching chess with kids who only look at the game as something to pass time and get their parents off their backs. That attitude I can handle if my job is just to teach them, as the average contact with each one is just a few minutes a week. But when I’m working with them for hours several times a week, trying to get them ready for matches, trying to help them recover from losses and win the next one, having to put up with the headgames some of them want to play is just not worth the personal expenditure.

2) Having spent several months over the course of the year working with both, Chess Assistant is, at the root of it, a better design and a better approach to chess databases than ChessBase, but the execution behind it limits its utility. For example, the export functions for publication have all sorts of wonderful options and the software has ways of working with many more fonts than ChessBase has, but these features are a little buggy, so not as useful as they could be. (In the interests of fairness, some of the bugs I’ve encountered don’t seem to show up on other installations, so perhaps there’s just something about the combination of hardware and software I use — I don’t like Windows and use it only as much as I absolutely have to — that triggers these bugs.) Unlike ChessBase, ChessAssistant can spot transpositions in openings, making it more useful in openings research, though ChessBase has an “Opening Report”feature that packs a lot of information (information is data plus meaning). Also, I’ve found that when Chessbase merges games, it does so at the point in the game where it wants to, not necessarily where I want it to. Chess Assistant is better behaved, in that respect.

3) Chess in Milwaukee is on the rise again, but the rise may not include the USCF. I’m trying to find a way the USCF can make itself relevant to the growing chess scene, but frankly, I’m not coming up with enough benefits to justify the cost. Either we’re going to have to find some more benefits to offer, such as an improved magazine, or we’re going to have to cut membership dues.

4) I need to write more about chess history. I have the material, I just haven’t done the writing. I have literally thousands of games played in many venues involving Wisconsin players, or at Wisconsin events. My apologies to you all for failing in that.

5) Youth chess is rising, in both quality and quantity. For the first time one of my students has placed on the national top 100 list for his age group. Alex Betaneli, as usual, has several. Wisconsin has 2 of the top 10 of the kids 8 and under, as well as at least one representative in almost all the other age lists for boys (no women or girls, yet, alas). Slowly we’re coming back into our historical position as one of the nation’s chess centers.

6) The lack of a regular club here in Milwaukee is getting to be a handicap, instead of just an inconvenience. We need a site to meet at. I’d like to hear from readers involved in other clubs as to how they pay for sites, what they pay, if they pay, where their clubs can meet. We’re stymied at the moment.

Where does The Chessmill go from here? Pages From a Patzer’s Notebook will return, though perhaps not in the same old form. I chose the name because it was goingto be my games; if I start doing HS league games, I’ll probably change it; while I have no problem with being called a patzer, I’m not comfortable calling other people that, no matter how you might argue the truth of the appelation.

Martz Annotates will become a more regular feature as well, once I iron out the kinks in getting the game displays to work. I dislike heartily the HTML export features of every database I’ve tried. None of them produce HTML that I can look at without cringing. The java applet I’ve been using is creaking, showing its age. PalView is probably the best I’ve used, but it has problems that I’ve promised to help on. Look for more interactive game displays to begin showing up by midyear, probably.

I still have hundreds of master games, still unpublished, played over the last half-decade, to publish. And I have three interviews booked, with more to come. And some people have talked to me about spawning a hardcopy version as well. We’ll see.

As I become more familiar with WordPress, I’ll either rework the site or give up on WP.

That’s where we are and where we’re going. Hope to have you along. If I don’t see you before then, I wish you all a very merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a joyous Kwanzaa. And in the new year, may all your sacrifices be sound (except against me).

So the Opening Report gets high high marks, but is it by itself worth the price of admission? So far, given unlimited resources, I’d generate Opening Reports from CB, then turn to CA to build my repertoire database, move it into Bookup for training purposes, and then either back to CB for repertoire scans on future game collections obtained, or leave it in Bookup for the same purpose.

I’m currently fiddling with all three because I’m looking for some power tools. For opening study, CB’s Opening Report clearly tops the field: there’s nothing like it in either of the other two, and it seems to be extremely useful and informative. However CB’s pokiness, and it’s reluctance to accept guidance from the operator about where games belong in the tree, and its near-complete ignorance on the subject of transpositions are damaging. Both CA and Bookup catch transpositions immediately, CA is much faster at finding games and much more obedient about putting them where they belong when you’re building your personal game tree. Bookup is tops at drilling you on the opening, and both CB and Bookup are good at showing you what’s new and relevant in a recently acquired game collection.

What this means is that CA and Bookup combined take first place in all of these categories except for the opening report, and even though you’re buying two products, they will cost less than CB9 with MegaBase2005. Whether that’s the best solution for yourself is up to you.

(Note: I’ve been a CA user for years now, and have just been looking in on the development of CB over the years, trying to figure out what it does better; part of that is curiosity — I keep wondering why it’s so popular — and part of it is because I need to stay somewhat familiar with it because friends use it and I get called on to help them; I need to know a way to do something, not necessarily the best or fastest way. So I admit there may be tips and tricks I’m unfamiliar with that address the problems I’ve seen. In my defense, I can say there’s nothing I’ve been able to locate so far in any of the help screens or documentation that helps. You should take this into account when deciding how useful my information is to you.)

Frankly, its marketshare mystifies me. I’ll have more to say as I continue the experiment.

We’re not likely to be confused with a grandmaster any time soon, but that doesn’t stop us from having an opinion on this.

In the current age of chess database software, even fewer books (and I’m including the db-based ebooks in this as well) than ever before are truly necessary. A beginning player needs a book (or books) which explains the general principles of the opening, the basic tactical maneuvers (pin, fork, etc.) and the basic endgame themes (elementary mates, pawn promotion, etc.) and patience.

The latter quality is hard to find, but essential to develop if it doesn’t exist.

Too many players today waste a lot of time memorizing openings. This results in a player than plays wonderfully, until the book line runs out. Then the player has no idea what to do. It doesn’t matter if the experts believe the line you played gives a huge advantage, if you don’t know how to exploit it.

At the recent SuperNationals in Tennessee, Anatoly Karpov was asked to comment on the state of coaching in the US. He paused, obviously trying to find a way to say it without offending, and said we place far too much emphasis on learning openings. In his opinion, a player shouldn’t bother with lots of opening memorization until they reach a rating of around 1800.

I gulped when I heard that, because I know full well that most of the players I’ve run into couldn’t have made it to 1800 without memorizing lots of offbeat (and even mainstream) lines. But that’s his point. They made it there, and cannot move on, because they don’t really understand what they’re doing.

So, to return to the premise, how many books are necessary? Not many. Which ones? Aye, there’s the rub.

Or is it a rub? Does it really matter whether you learn your middlegame principles from Reuben Fine’s book, or the two volume sets from Romanovsky or Euwe, or Kotov and Keres, or Nimzovich, or Lasker? Or any of the dozens, even hundreds, who have written since? We don’t think which book matters nearly as much as publishers and booksellers would have us believe. It’s more important to your development as a chess player that you study than what. As you go your opponents will show you what you need to work on.