I have the chessmaster 9000 edition and I was thinking of taking something newer.I was hoping that ubisoft would release a new version of it, but there is no mention on ubisoft website about the 12th edition yet.And some of the users say that the 11th edition has many bugs,so it is better to get the 10th edition.Does anyone here know about it?

Is there anything better to play against or use for analysis?

chess.com, of course! -> www.chess.com/membership.html :D

"Never ask a fox to mind the hens."

Well,to be honest,I was hoping for greater participation,but it is Saturday.Maybe on Monday people will see the forum.

 Haha I don't have any software, so I just use chess.com. Seems okay most of the time. Sometimes I can't understand the moves. I hear that Fritz or something is good.

Thank you people for your answers.Anybody else online who knows?

I have to agree with other posters on here.  I have Fritz, Rybka, ChessBase...all of them are good products.  But, I don't like playing against a machine.  I am not inspired.  With my chess.com membership I get a little of everything.  Turn-based games, I always have those to look at, live chess if I want to play now, good articles, chess mentor, videos for a change of pace and of course the tactics trainer.  Soooo many good useful things in one place.  Premium chess.com membership is a better value for the money than the other products out there.  That is my opinion.

There are some very strong engines out there now available for free.  The most important software is a database program.  Get one which allows you to sort by opening, player, position, material, and positional features (all the good ones do).  Get a good database of games to go with it, and update it with TWIC (also free) for all the latest tournament games, all major events and most open tournaments.

Want to see all Rubenstein's Rook endings, or Capablanca's minor piece endings?  Takes under a minute, most of which is you typing the names.  Fischer's wins in the Sicilian Nadjorf?  Done!  What the GMs are playing this week against the Catalan?  Boom!

Engines are fantastic for analyzing games, especially spotting tactical errors, and also in working on opening novelties for blunder-checking, but they are just too strong to help you improve by playing them unless you weaken their settings.  Databases let you study games by strong players at the click of a button.

   I have Fritz 12 and Chessmaster 10, I use both programs quite extensively, but as Erik said, having a membership on here(especially a premium one) added to either one of those two programs I mentioned will help you quite a bit.

   Cm 10 is a great program and I was using that series for years until I got Fritz 12. That added to my membership here has improved my chess greatly.

   -Mark

You should probably  buy one of the newer Rybka models which are amazing for analysis. If you are looking for a website membership of course i always support chess.com but i would recommend Internet Chess Club one of if not the best hess website around. It dose not have a fourm system like chess.com but has good players , amazing articles and game commentary etc

Here is a blog, where a friend of mine spent a lot of time gathering links to free chess things on the internet and good sites for getting data from.  He doesn't maintain it anymore, but I think most of the links still work:

http://bishopsbounty.blogspot.com/2009/02/two-bishops-chess-strategy.html

Fritz is very useful for me. Playing against a computer allows you to exercise your tactical ability.

Chess engine/database:  http://scid.sourceforge.net/download.html

Chessmaster X is excellent and cheap, I recommend it.

Of course, buy a premium or diamond membership to chess.com first.

ChessBase seems to be the most popular.

I was thinking of chessmaster 11,but it is said that it is full of bugs.And there  is no mention on ubisoft website about the 12th edition.Some of the users say that the 11th edition has bugs,so it is better to get the 10th edition.Does anyone here know about it?Is chessmaster 11 really that bad?

Friz10!

I've been weighing buy/not buying some kind of chess software-- a big name engine and something to run it in -- or a big name database of games an something to manipulate the information it contains, for some time.  I keep coming back to the fact that the most gain I can make as a player is to just use what I have (books, and free stuff on line, and chess.com).

This might be a topic for its own thread in a different sub-forum, but the one thing I'd like to see here is a way to better organize the chess.com db of games for individual study.  I don't have a more specific way of saying what I'm looking for, and I could just down load a bunch of games an plug them into SCID or something, but I'd rather it all be self contained on my "my home" page here so I can access it it and progress through it as the biggest part of my "study master games" part of learning. 

(this is still probably best suited for a different thread in a different sub-forum) I'd also like to know how often that db is updated, and with what is it updated-- as that would show to a greater extent chess.com is of value to us learning the game.  I've been a diamond member for like a year and I do think it is worth it.

Thank you all for spending time answering my questions.I have another one:does any program play and analyse random960 games?I tried to analyse my random960 games(which I played on this site)using chessmaster's 9th edition,but it can't load the pgn files.

A very short game here : http://www.chess.com/echess/game.html?id=41357280. You can get the pgn.