Best 5 free Chess Software

**update 23 oct 2014

My favourite Top 5 chess softwares which are completely free:

1. Arena : Companion to a chess Player! comes with tons of features.

Main features:  opening database, Analyse games with engines, pgn games database, endgame tablebase, play fics, engine matches etc.

http://www.playwitharena.com

2. Lucas Chess: play rated games offline, good training utility!

features: Play rated games with engines (all level difficulty: Complete Beginner to post GM level), Learning Utilities, pgn support, nice gui.

http://www-lucaschess.rhcloud.com/index

3. Scid vs Pc:
features: pgn database, chess engine, opening, play fics.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scidvspc/

4. Tarrasch:
features: pgn database, basic openings, engine.
http://www.triplehappy.com/downloads.html

5. knights Gambit:
feature: Play

http://knights-gambit.en.softonic.com/

nice... thnx

1.ChessX PGN database and viewer

2. Stockfish Engine

3. Critter Engine

4. Komodo 3 Engine

These are available for both Macintosh and Windows

interesting

i like scid personally.

BabasChess - best interface for the Free Internet Chess Server.  Can handle PGNs, engines for analysis (UCI and Winboard), and is nearly infinitely customizable.  I maintain a website devoted to this interface:

http://babaschess.weebly.com/

Lucas Chess - Amazing piece of software that is severly under-rated.  Lots of really great training modes, very customizable (can add new positions for study, store your opening repertoire and let you practice it, etc.)

http://lucaschess.host22.com/

Chess Hero - Also under-rated.  Let's you pick positions from PGNs in a myriad of ways (randomly, sequentially, etc.) for practicing.  Can be just quiet positions picked randomly from big files of games or specific positions selected for whatever reason (tactics, etc.).  Performance graded based on configurable criteria (game move is best, computer engine grading, etc.).

http://innokuo.altervista.org/chesshero.html

Scid vs. PC - Database software that does everything one could possibly need in a database program.  This is a more recently upated fork of the SCID project.

http://scidvspc.sf.net

Chess Position Trainer - Trial version is free, but you can pay for more features.  Full features work for a month before deactivating to the free version.  The features of the free version are functional for nearly everyone.  Allows you to enter your own repertoire of opening moves quickly and easily and then train yourself to memorize what you have entered/learned using various flashcard/spaced repetition methods.

http://www.chesspositiontrainer.com

I really feel any budding chess player should have all five of these free programs.  I also feel commercial software is unnecessary due to the quality of these programs.

I tried Arena 3.0 but it kept playing up on my computer. Plus it was hard for me to read the german. Lol.

Lucas Chess is very nice. I can also use it as a pgn reader. Very handy for all those downloads. 

Lucas Chess is nice; Arena is also a very nice piece of software. I couldn't care less which app you use, but someone reading your post might get the impression that there's something wrong with Arena, when in fact you simply didn't take the time to learn how to use it.

When you stated that Arena...kept playing up on your computer, do you mean that it was making moves when you didn't want it to? If that's the case, just click on the Edit button, and the engine won't make moves.

German? It's been a while for me, but I think when you first install the program, it asks you to choose the language. It could be that it defaults to German (idk), but I'm guessing that you didn't notice that you needed to pick English. It helps to pay attention to little things like that.

I agree with @EscherehosE that Arena is an excellent free UCI.  It is my non-Fritz choice for use on my laptop when I'm away from the big desktop computer.  All UCI's tend to engage the chess engine when you load a game for some reason.  I think they should allow default settings to be modified to turn the engine off unless desired, but what do I know ...?  Anyway, it is simple to just click the tiny "Edit" button on the top menu when starting any game or analysis if you don't want the engine to interfere or when manually playing over a game.

free as in beer or as in freedom?

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

What about Droidfish, TacticTrainer and iChess?

I think with most free chess software, it's assumed that it's only free beer, but most people are OK with those restrictions. It's only you fanatics that get all bent out of shape...

somebody's a little moody today

anyway I use both SCID and the Stockfish engine

Chess base lite.  

"I agree with @EscherehosE that Arena is an excellent free UCI." yeah Arena is very good, like how you can have all your engines analyse at the same time (i.e infinite analysis) , plus with free engines like houdini 1.5a and stockfish, more than just a substitute for fritz interface

Arena is awesome. Plus the Critter engine? who needs chessbase with houdini. At least at my level. 

Thanks everyone for the advice.

if you could only have one - which ? and why ?

My fav is Guess The Move! I use it every day to play solitaire chess. The other suggestions on this page are also vg. U can find GTM along with other great free software at https://sites.google.com/site/fredm/#downloads

LucasChess is very good, you can also make training position from the games you played.