I was thinking seriously about upgrading my Chessbase Light to the premium version. So I clicked on the "online upgrade" button. What the heck? - 49,99£ to upgrade? That's $100 US for those of you without currency converters.
Nice program, but $100? That's gonna break me.
yeh pretty sick man
I payed for chessbase but I'm seriours player, if you can find free pgn database files you can use freeware such as Scid. Or look at the comerical compention Chess Assistant. If you already own Fritz or any Chessbase engine. It has a built in database similiar to chessbase without all the cool tools which you might not even use. Fritz cost only $20.00 and on ebay most likely get it for less.
In terms of a hobby which we spend so much time playing, $100 is peanuts. Consider a movie is like $8, plus more for concessions, so say $12. That $12 for 3 hours of entertainent which is then gone forever. Chessbase can entertain you for a very long time for $100.
Now, I have not seen Chessbase - I don't know if it is worth $100. That's a different argument.
Guys,
Just to let you know, the download section of this website has in it, a free chess database program. No, it's not Chessbase, but it is very good. I use it exclusively. It has several features to download huge (multi-million games) databases, also for free. It's called chessDB, and more info can be found here: http://www.chess.com/download/view/chess-db.
Save your money.
Just so you know, the new Hiarcs 12 release at Chessbase is also listed at the same price (49.99£ incl. VAT) -- it is being sold at $65.11 USD without VAT. If you haven't checked out their current conversion rate, you might want to e-mail them just in case there isn't a listed USD price -- it may be more advantageous for American purchasers than you thought.
The Hiarcs 12 listing can be found at http://www.chessbase.com/shop/newproducts.asp .
Cheers,
Russ
Indeed. I use Fritz 10 and Arena 1.1. If Arena ever gets the fully-complete Swiss tournament code into its engine tourney settings, I would switch to it for my computer chess needs almost exclusively. To my knowledge, they are still only at the pseudo-code stage found in Arena 1.1. Running Swiss tournaments with a big engine field is far superior to round robins if one only has one PC as I do -- less time consuming!
Both programs have their strengths.
i think you will find that price is 49 euros which makes the conversion about $75
a good investment if you play a lot of games. especially as you get access to their online dbase with millions of games.
If I were going to pay for chessbase I would go for the full version for 149 euro. The upgrade from light to premium is just a license for light, right? Light has a limit of 3500 games per DB. You can load a larger DB but it clips the number of games to 3500. (The web site says 3200 games, but my CB light trial (no license) clips to 3500.) If positional searches are important to you, then 3500 is nowhere near enough games, considering there are free DBs with 3 orders of magnitude more games, 3.5 million.
http://www.chessbase.com/shopd/
http://www.chessbase.com/download/cblight2007/index.asp
I tried chessDB freeware and found it clunky. Maybe I didn't give it enough time, but the views don't seem very well integrated. The pgn view for example is in a separate pop-up window. You do get the 3.5 million games DB. You just have to download and install chessDB first then use the application to download the DB. Took about 5 hrs to download the 3.5 million DB, when I did it, even with comcast high speed internet. (the server side must be slow) The sister freeware that came before chessDB (I forget the name) seemed about the same in clunky factor.
When buying gear for learning or competition, I like to separate the issues buy first asking, "money aside, which is the best?" Then I ask, "what am I getting for the extra money, over the second best."
For now I just use Fritz. It's not intuitive, but once you get to know it, it's very efficient for analysis and positional searches. You can create DBs with it, too, but you can't do some of the advanced merges and manipulation of DBs that you can do with chessbase. (I don't fully understand the differences here as I don't have a licensed chessbase, yet.) The only thing I hate about Fritz is you cant' turn the engines off and have them stay off. They pop back on every time you load a new game or position and during some edits of games, like deleting a variation (I think.)
I know I will buy full version chessbase some day. I like to drag the pieces on the screen when studying text books, and want to save what I've done into a DB. Then I want to be able to re-arrange the work (games and positions) later, in page order for example. I can create the DB in Fritz, but I think I need something like chessbase for doing the re-order of the games. Can anyone confirm? Also, a friend told me that in chessbase when you turn the engines off, they stay off. CB light trial as far as I can tell has the engines disabled, so I haven't been able to test that. Can anyone confirm?
By the way, I dont' think the excellent chess game analysis package has been written yet. For starters it should have multiple tabbed windows, each with a full instance of the application (similar to firefox or excel, in that sense), so you could have (for example) a game you are playing (or are otherwise interested in) in one window, a game from a positional search in another window, and a related game from a text book in another window. And when you turn the engines off, they should stay (deep breath) OOOFFF.
A senior engineer in my group who's also a chess enthusiast was half kidding when he said that when we retire we should spec and write a really good chess analysis package and sell it for $49 US and make a fortune. I told him it's probably not as easy as it seems. If we could do it though, I think a lot of people would buy it. 3.5 million game DBs and decent engines are available for free, or you could by the latest super-engine for $60 to add on. What's missing is a really good graphical user interface. (I'm not sure about the database manipulation (merge, sort, re-order) part yet.)
i have the light premium version and can confirm that you dont need to turn the engines off as in fact you have to specifically start them when needed.
with the premium you can add extra engines. it comes with fritz 6 as standard and this does work in the light free version. I have added the rybka v1.0 beta which is a stronger engine (and its free)
you can have up to 8 game windows open at the same time. and you dont need to download the dbase as it has an online search facility
PerfectGent, good info, thanks! The 8 windows is, indeed, excellent! I thought it was like Fritz, one window.
So, what would one get for the extra 100 euro for full chessbase over light? The ability to manipulate large databases on your hard drive? Anything else? Maybe we need a new subject line for this question, "Chessbase full is frikken $200 ???!!!" ;).
You live in the United States, you can buy a Starter Package with Chessbase 9 and Big Database 2008 for $140. You don't have to pay "an extra 100 Euro" for CB9.
Big Database 2008 ($50) - is a database with 4 million historical games. You can look up where your games deviated from master games and compare how they chose to continue, or how they handled a particular endgame.
Chessbase 9 ($90) - is a database search and analysis tool. I bought if before the new Light was released, but I noticed Light doesn't have as many search options. Chessbase Light Premium costs 49.99 EURO ($78), right? So the difference is only $22 in the US.
Chess Assistant Silver Package is $89 download or $99 for the disks. Large database, and both Shredder and Rybka chess engines. Highly recommended.
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