chess software

hello everybody,

i am looking for chess software to analyze my games. i did a little research and found that there are quite a few free chess Gui's and strong engines while the not free software costs are high.

the free engines that are availabe are pretty strong and since i am not a 2500 player i am sure that it doesn't matter in a game, but does it matter in the quality of the analysis? could i really learn more from a stronger engine?

what are exactly the advanteges of the not free Chess softwares against the free ones? 

what software would you recomend?

thaks,

Itsik

Playing chess against a chess program is pointless because you will lose all the time. Playing human opponents on the internet (for example here on chess.com) is much more entertaining.

Still a chess program is very useful for analyzing your games afterwards and point out mistakes. Obviously the stronger the program the better moves it will find. The best commercial programs are stronger than the best free programs so they will give you better analysis although all chess programs will see simple tactical combinations (simple for the computer does not means simple for us) almost immediately.

So many people argue that the free programs are good enough for us amateurs. However I believe that you should look at more than the strength of the program, the user interface is also important and thats where the commercial programs are usually better.

For example I have Fritz from Chessbase and that program gives you verbal annotations on your games in plain english! Also the program creates training questions from your games and uses arrows on the board to highlight important topics. So this is the kind of chess program you should be looking at.

Even though I use Fritz now Im thinking about getting Rybka from Chessbase (the same interface as Fritz but stronger engine) wich is the strongest chess program in the world. Note that you can also get Rybka Aquarium from Convekta wich is the same engine with a different interface.

Rybka 4 is the newest version but keep in mind there are two versions, the regular and Deep Rykba 4 wich is for multiprocessor computers.

Many people also like Chessmaster for its userfriendlyness but the engine is not as strong.

i recommend Scid chess software.In it it has 3 chess engines:Scidlet,Toga(2600 rating)and Phanallax11(2200).

You don't need expensive ones like rybka because it is not at all a big difference and it has an special option: you can click''Get PGN'' and the game that you played is automatical inserted,Cool isnt it?

ok you can download it here and i hope this will help you:http://scid.sourceforge.net/download.html

All the best

I had an interesting experience with SCID ... I played Stockfish 1.8 and had the SCID interface set to make the engine use the books - anyway I played a Fischer attack variation of the Sicilian as white and got to an endgame with Queen + 2 Bishops for the computer and Queen + 1 Knight for me - the computers king had no pawns for protection.

I found that I could keep checking the computer with the Queen or Knight for a lot of moves, then suddenly the computer collapsed and gave me all the pieces - I wondered what was happening and then noticed that I was out of time - it was a 5/3 game!

[edit: I think the engines should use their own opening books]

thanks, friends

what free chess programs are there

i think that HOUDINI is stronger than Rybka, you can get more info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_engine

Stockfish is a very strong and free and open source engine. You can pay for houdini which is slightly stronger but honestly the difference in strength is pretty small. There are a lot of GUI's out there. I personally like "Hiarcs Chess Explorer" for a commercial GUI. I like ChessX (I post recent builds at www.box.com/chessx ) for a free GUI. Also the Chessbase products (www.chessbase.com) have the most features and are the most popular. The free SCIDvsPC and SCIDvsMac products are also quite popular.

Stockfish is just as strong as Rybka except Stockfish is Free

I really think nowadays you should only pay for chess software if there is a feature (I can't imagne what) that you feel you really cant do without. My CB and fritz got tossed when I replaced my PC 2 years ago, and I never had the urge to reinstall or upgrade.