Which version of ChessMaster is the best?

Hi, I would just like to say, despite the mistaken advice given by some of the users on this forum, there are no tutorial enhancements on chessmaster 11 over than number ten, and the attacking chess tutorials by Christiansen Larry are some of the latest enhancements. For this reason chessmaster 10 outshines number 11 in every department, and the fact that you can buy it for a fraction of the price off ebay is the clincher without a shadow of a doubt. If they do release a version 12, which I for one would be a great fan of, i just hope that they add some new tutorials material in to the mix! But the fact that Josh Waitzkin has retired from chess to become a black belt in bjj, makes this quite unlikely im sorry to say. The only way I can see this happening is if some chess champion/master takes up the reigns from where he left off, but then they would need to get permission and the programming team back into gear. Who can do this?

Thats not true - in the grandmaster edition there is at least the "Art of learning" section in the Josh Waitzkin academy which is brand new and in fact a fantastic learning tool....

Grandmaster 11, but there are a few bugs in the academy section. They can at least release an update to fix those bugs. They develop a new version but don't maintain it.

I have chessmaster 5000.

Save your money.

They are all rubbish.

Not necessarily. You can learn alot from Chessmaster, especially in the tutorials.

What have you learned that could not have found out from free study?

Your rating is still at just below site average.

For beginners it is a good training software. Site average as in fun, nothing serious? Think you need to spend more time in reality.

Not true. Your brain is the best training software.

Your reality is 1320.

Not a beginner: Member Since: Jul 26, 2009

Have given sound advice but by all means carry on with chessmaster if thinking that is the way ahead.

I have a fond affinity for Chessmaster because Chessmaster 3000 was the first computer chess program I ever had, which came on a free CD with my Packard Bell computer back in 1994 or so.

I now have Chessmaster XI and really like it a lot, and the analysis is good enough for someone down at my level.  I've never noticed any bugs in it at all and the interface and graphics are nice, but I did use a cheat code to unlock all the boards and sets since I thought it was silly and unnecessary to have them locked until you reach a particular rating.

I did manage to find the old DOS versions of Chessmaster 2000 and Chessmaster 2100 which run fine using DOSBox in Windows 7.  They're fun to play with from time to time.  I also still have the CM3000 disk but it won't run under Win7.  It does run under Vista but crashes now and then.  I can run Windows 3.11 in DOSBox but no video/sound drivers, and CM3000 won't work without sound drivers installed.

Just out of interest Vilik, in the art of learning section of cm 11, what exactly does this do? I didn't notice this when I had the game. Does Josh replay any more games, or is it merely a novelty piece addition, in which case I'm not interested!

10th edition is defenetly the best one.

Yes, some of his own games.

Hi Chessph, please tell me the oppenent's name and year of some of the games you are alluding to, to see if i already have them on cm 10, okay thanks!

I have the 9th and 10th editions. I was looking for the 11th edition, but it's hard to find now at a reasonable price, and I heard you only get two installs with the 11th before the DVD becomes a nice coaster. So for me, the slight additional tutorial content of 11 doesn't make up for those two negatives.

I usually use the 10th edition for playing engines. The 9th edition is better for analyzing (10th has some broken mentor lines) and running engine tournaments (10th forces you to manually start each game in the engine tournament), but then I hardly ever use Chessmaster for analyzing games or running engine tournaments, anyway. My major problem with the 9th edition was getting it to install on Windows 7 with all of the Ubisoft patches. After a LOT of work and a bit of luck, I was able to get all of the patches installed and have it run in "no CD required" mode. Others might not be so lucky with the 9th edition patch installations.

So overall, I like the 10th edition best.

Featurewise - Besides the tutorials, the other feature I like is the nice player statistics window, which includes a rating graph. Some of the other features in my mind are either so-so or below average. (You can only import Winboard engines; Ubisoft went out of its way to make it difficult to export The King engine to another GUI; Endgame tablebases are a proprietary design, they only work in the Chessmaster GUI, and they don't work in analyze mode; Online play is now defunct.)

I also got tired of the unnatural play of many of the CM engine personalities. I already had the commercial HIARCS, Shredder, and Delfi engines, so I just imported them into CM using a Polyglot (UCI-to-Winboard) adapter. Those three engines provide much more realistic play. The only disadvantage of importing these engines is that for each strength setting, you have to import a separate copy of the engine. So if you want ten strength settings of the HIARCS engine, you have to import ten different copies of the engine into CM.

I downloaded the game directly from Ubisoft for $20.  There was no provision for a backup, but I put the 4 GB install file on a flash drive in case it ever crashes or I get a new computer.  The best part is that I don't have to have a CD in the drive for the program to run.

Was this recently? Could you provide a link? (I looked there not long ago and didn't see a download link, but I'll look again.)

I found the Ubisoft link, but when I click on "Buy Now", it just directs me to Amazon.com.

http://www.ubi.com/US/Games/Info.aspx?pId=5893

Yeah, I know. Actually, I think I read on the Ubisoft forum that Ubisoft has made an agreement with a distributor to offer Chessmaster as part of some packages. I don't know if that will actually happen, though. And I'd really be surprised if we ever see a 12th edition, although I'd be happy to be wrong about this.

No, I think this was a couple years ago.  I think it was not too long after it came out.