Hi Chessers,

I am a reletive beginner at chess and have recently purchased Fritz 11, my first ever chess software. I am finding it a bit impenetrable. Would love to hear some of your ideas about how best to use it to improve.

Thanks to all at Chess. com

Have a look at Chessbase (the database that comes with Fritz). It's difficult to get to grips with at first, but there IS info on it, and there's some stuff on here if you search the forums for it. If you get PGN files for your games on here you can store them in Chessbase. Once it's in there you can select some of those files and analyse them using Fritz. When you've done it, you'll find it's pretty straightforward to do in future. As said above, only analyse AFTER you've finished games. You can also use it for opening training and tactical training, and those are covered in the manual.

Personally, I wouldn't use Fritz for playing practice (ie playing against it), I just use it to analyse games and a way of keeping everything in once place. There's also a wealth of games which you can order by theme or opening already in Chessbase.