Komodo Chess 9

#9

When you analyse your games, use engines to find mistakes you make or tactics you miss. Go through your games on your own first and only use engines at critical points where you cannot understand the position or can't find the best plan.

Have a look at some of the chess youtubers and see how they analyse their games (E.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-13-0F2yxSc).

Here you can download plenty of free and strong engines:
http://www.sdchess.ru/Engines_UCI_top.htm

I really recommend you ScidvsPC, as it can be used as a database and, at the same time, you can play against any engine you add. I have these ones right now:


Regards!

#9

To add, chessbase is good software for database access and what not. However, it is indeed costly, and there are free alternatives like scidvspc and many users swear by it, but I am not a big fan of scidvspc.

As for me, I don't use chessbase. I refer to 365chess.com when I need to look at specific master games or opening statistics. Most of my time is spent in playing chess online and OTB with friends, or studying from chess books.

I wanted to thank those of you who helped me in this thread again. I'm not cheap and I don't quibble over every little purchase but certain things like software, hardware, cars, etc ...just require due diligence before investing in.

In the end I avoided the glitz, glamour, bells and whistles that the ChessBase line of products throws at you. I spent hours looking into arena, fritz, stockfish, komodo, etc. I definitely don't need a commercial engine with the Stockfish Dev versions out there. So Komodo I don't need. As for Fritz and the Chessbase Database and Cloud, etc...I just don't like it very much. I'm not comfortable with it, I don't like it's style, and I have a system I'm more comfortable with and it costs absolutely next to nothing:

-Lichess...obviously.
-ChessTempo Gold Sub for training and databases
-Stockfish Newest Dev Version
-LucasChess
-Arena
-ChessMentor via Chess.com Diamond

That, combined with the books I have like My System and Chess Praxis and it would be pointless for me to shell out $99 for the package I was considering, even though it IS a great value and product for the right consumer.

Stockfish + Lichess really do go hand in hand, though and it's a beautiful thing to see them in action.

Oh...I also wanted to add here that the combination of ChessTempo's Gold sub with their database + Stockfish is probably the most underrated weapon I can find out there. It's a total of $4 month and I, personally, think a lot of people would prefer it to Chessbase's line if they gave it a heads up comparison. Not to mention that ChessTempo's tactical training is best in the biz.

@ #8: Thanks again for this - http://abrok.eu/stockfish/

I was clueless prior :) This is fantastic and yeah ...no reason to shell out money on any other engine out there since none of them compare to the latest build at all.

Related to this, and as I'm learning more about how to use engines and GUI's: Gull 3 x64 is a beast. Just tied the 9/19/15 build of Stockfish in a 3/2 blitz I set up on Arena. Game was drawn by the 50 move rule on move 109 :p

Glad you found your favorite setup.
I still think there's no comparison on what you can actually do with a full fledged database software (be that Chessbase or Scid, doesn't necessary have to be a commercial one) compared to an online only service, but that's me...

@ LarsenB: And how much better, in your opinion, is the pay version of the Chessbase Database compared to the free one?

You mean Chessbase vs Chessbase Light?
Well, drastically better... not only CBLight has not been updated in a while, and it's even a bit difficult to download, but the database size limitation put's a serious gap on what you can actually do. It is however, a good demo for the full product.

If you instead meant Chessbase vs Scid, then it is a bit debatable... both are powerful tools, and even the free Scid can satisfy pretty much all your chess needs; it does even many things better (i.e. the way it handles tournament crosstables is extremely nice)

It is however a bit less user-friendly (the UI suffers from being developed with multi-OS libraries) and it lacks one of the nicest things in chessbase, IMO: support for multimedia databases

All the trainers/instructional DVDs in the chessbase catalogue are a terrific learning tools, and are all very well made (they are also actually standalone products, since they include a "viewer" if you lack the full Chessbase software)