Hello guys. I have entered a whole new dimension after I joined chess.com community. However, I have to be honest that I came upon the term tablebase few days back as well as it's charm of forming algorithms to exactly predicting the number of moves for a win or a forceful draw( Or self loss :-D). I scoured the internet for it but to my horror, I found the Nalimov tablebase to be a whooping 6.92 GB(compressed) ( It says something about [X] mens). First of all, What does a 4 men tablebase mean? Secondly, It would take ages (AGES to be precise) for me to download an entire GBs of volume of TB. Secondly, My chief focus is a tablebase which helps me with K-B-N vs K, K-B-B vs K as well as KR[or N, or B or both]P(n) vs K[or N, or B or both]P(n) endings, so that I can start endgame study( no practice, either I pulverise my adversary before 30 moves, or get dragged by the nape upto fourty, I wish I have a better stand on endgames. Is there anyway I can save my bandwidth( 30kbps avg. download speed) from bringing me the test of patience? I only have an hour's access to the net, so I wish it were more easier for me. Guys, help?

6-men tablebases are available on the Shredder's website.

To answer your question about what an "x"-men tablebase is, I would imagine it means that the table in question stores data on a chess game where there are "x" pieces (also known as "chessmen") on the board.

Yes, "6-men tablebases" means all positions featuring both kings and 4 other units.

I wish to make a complete pgn file in different scenarious so that I can study it from time to time. But the problem of buying is that my family doesnt have a credit card and No amazon branches is here, so it could be VERY expensive.(Dollars are very valuable here..... $300 is more than enough for 2 months household expenses!). I need to hook it up in my crafty because it is really bad at endgames, And I wish to memorise patterns by which I can and should be able to reproduce it in the OTBS as well as online matches. And "obscure" reason shall definately NOT be cheating because I dont want to be banned..... AS SIMPLE AS THAT! :D

You could study these endgames by playing some set position against crafty. Crafty doesn't need the tablebases to give you a good challenge in those endgames.

To learn how to play them, look for relevant endgame videos and Chess Mentor courses, as you are a Diamond member. No need for tablebases either...

Table bases don't "predict" anything, they tell you exactly the amount of moves and the result with zero doubt, that's the point. 

With 30 kbps and 1 download hour per day, it might take you months to download the files. If you only had a friend with wideband service who could download it for you and burn the files to a couple of DVDs...

Another idea that might work is to generate the files yourself. I've heard that it's possible to generate Nalimov TB files with a program called tbgen.exe, although I've never done it and I don't know exactly where tbgen.exe could be obtained.

Gaviota tablebases are newer than Nalimov TBs. Gaviota TBs have a more liberal distribution policy and may become more popular than Nalimov TBs. Some engines and GUIs are starting to support Gaviota TBs. The following link discusses generating Gaviota TB files -

https://sites.google.com/site/gaviotachessengine/Home/endgame-tablebases-1

Edited addition - I just noticed this Chessbase discussion -

http://www.chessbase.com/support/support.asp?pid=105

I also noticed that my old copy of Fritz contains the tbgen.exe file!

Even though I already have 5-piece Nalimov files, I decided to see if I could generate them. The generation of the Nalimov files using tbgen.exe from my Fritz CD seems to be going OK. I'm guessing it'll probably take a few days to generate all of the 5-piece files (longer if you have an old computer). If you or any of your friends has Fritz, you could copy the tbgen files from the Fritz CD/DVD and generate them on your computer. My Fritz CD has four TB generation files, all inside the "TBs" folder. Total size of all four files is only 260 kb.

If you decide to generate the files, you should probably check the generated files to ensure that none are corrupted. You can either use the Wilhelm chess program to do this (I can get the link if you need it), or you can download the MD5 checksums and use a hashing program to check the files.

The chess mentor I already tried.... there is only the 2 bishop ending there... I want more tyes of endings...

I would be relly happy if you could quote me some of the best available videos. You see, it has just been 3 months that I joined, and my diomond membership has been sponsored my someone else. Except the vids by david pruess ( suggested by the article...), I know nothing of that sort,(My sponser(GhostNight) suggested me the stonewall...And I seems to be an alien here.Help?

Have a look here, and select the category you're interested in.

The generation of the 5-piece Nalimov set using the Fritz generator continues, but I really misjudged the required time. It looks like it'll take closer to three weeks instead of three days. A small tip - I initially accepted the default cache size of 8 MB. After a while, the generator starting getting much slower. Bumping up the cache size to a larger value helped. (I'm using 512 MB. Your free RAM will be a factor in how high you'll be able to set the cache size.) This Fritz Nalimov generator is much slower than I remember the Gaviota generator being, but it will cross the finish line eventually.

A comment on choice of engines - Most engines aren't particularly good at endgames, especially without tablebases. (And often even with tablebases, if the pieces exceed the tablebase capabilities!) Without tablebases, Crafty's endgame doesn't impress me. Houdini and Critter (and a step behind, Stockfish) seem to do better in the endgame.

My total ram on this comp is 512 MB....XD

If you want to go extreme you could get all the 6 men tablebases. It works out about 1.3TB which is 1300GB, so downloading would take years!

You could get someone to put it on an external harddrive for you, this company offer that service;

http://www.openingmaster.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=168&Itemid=178

not sure how much it would cost though in addition to the harddrive.

Yeah, I just thought it was interesting. Point taken, no help to the OP.

Experiment complete. It took right at two weeks, but I lost about one day due to various downtime episodes. So really about 13 days. This was on an average laptop. If it's done on a slower machine, maybe it'd take around a month? (Just a wild guess.) I also validated the checksums of the files - they were all good.

I have completed more than half rite now! Sorry, Dont have dedicated time, since the power failure is a major issue here! I am gonna finish it soon. Thanks EscherehcsE!