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ChessBase Reviews |
Last updated 9 July 2000
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ChessBase 7 Part 4
One of the most controversial areas for correspondence players is the use of analysis engines. With ChessBase 7 these can be switched on at the click of the mouse and analysis is displayed on screen.
I don't intend to get into the heated debate as to whether or not players should be using such engines to look at games that they are currently playing, but I do firmly believe that they can be of great help when studying other completed games. Too often when looking at Grandmaster games I have found that I have totally missed important lines simply because my mind has become focused on a particular variation and become blind to other possibilities.
With the analysis engine switched on you can set it to display a set number of variations at once. For example, if you have set the number of variation as 4 then you will see analysis for whatever the engine considers to be the 4 strongest lines. A quick glance can soon show if you are missing some important point. Of course you have to have good engines available to gain the greatest advantage, These come with chess playing programs which are sold as separate packages, usually for under £40. ChessBase produce some excellent programs such as Fritz6, Hiaracs 732, Nimzo 732 and Junior 6. All are excellent sparring partners and all of their analysis engines can be used from within ChessBase 7. Different engines have different qualities. Hiaracs 732 is strong and popular amongst certain professionals but I found it took a lot longer that Fritz6 to reach the same depth of analysis.
Having purchased a playing program they actually have more analysis options than are available from inside ChessBase. You can do a full analysis of a game, blunder check it, or do correspondence analysis from any given position.
Blunder check can be quite useful as it takes less time that analysing the whole game. Analysis is created at points where the engine thinks significant improvement can be made compared to the actual move played. This then focuses your attention on specific points of the game.
Correspondence analysis is also useful for deep analysis of a given position. The user selects the point in the game for analysis and enters a series of branching numbers. The user might select 4, 3, 2. Essentially what you are telling the engine to do is to find the best 4 lines from the start position, then for each of those lines the best 3 lines from there, and finally the best 2 lines from each of those lines. The program can then work away on its own for several hours and produce a tree of analysis for the user.
The final option is to have the engine analyse a complete game for you. I get games sent to me for the games column, the vast majority of which have already been annotated by the sender. Occasionally I also receive games which have only the bare moves and no annotations whatsoever. To be honest with limited space in the magazine they have only a very slight chance of being published. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly I am not confident that I have the chess playing ability to do justice to the game by annotating it myself. Secondly players who have annotated games themselves have put in a great deal of work and get a higher priority.
However this article gave me the opportunity to let our readers see some computer analysis so I have selected the following game sent in by Ian Marshall. I have used Fritz6 and selected full analysis mode with the training facility switched on. Hence the "?" marks at certain points. The computer took just over an hour to annotate the game and to be honest I felt it would be a good beginning for anyone who wanted to annotate their own game.
The computer had access to Mega Database 99 as a reference manual. I would be interested to hear from our readers what they feel about the analysis produced. Malcolm Pein (0171 388 2404) will be delighted to give advice on all of ChessBase's products.
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