It's interesting... What do you make of the % in the right-hand column of the Statistics view? I can't figure out what it's supposed to be.. It's obviously not the percentage of recorded games in which the move was played, and it's not the percentage of points in those games won by the person making the move...
Ohhh... it's the percentage of points won from here by White. Hmm.
Was quite surprised to find an app from Chessbase in the app store this morning. It’s called cb online.
It's very simple, 4 icons at the bottom of the screen present you with:
Board
Statistics
Games
Players
The board allows you to play through an opening to reach a desired opening position. Using the statistics icons allows you to access the statistics for that opening, showing how often and how successful that opening has been. You can also navigate through openings using the statistics option and the position will be there when you go back to the board. When you're ready you can then go to games option to browse a list of games played in that opening. These games can be selected and then played through on the board. The Player icon/option allows you to search for games by player.
Looks like it will be a useful tool for researching and refining opening play. Usually, I would have to wait until I can get to my PC to do this i.e. play through a game and then search the database to see how I can tweak an opening and learn from stronger player etc. Very useful if you are working on your repertoire and you want to see what these stronger players went for when you got “out of book”.
It is a little basic, however, and I found it quite annoying that I had to go back to the board and replay all moves to the beginning position before I could move onto a new game. A new game or reset option would be welcome so more functionality is required but it is encouraging to see a Chessbase release on iOS.
About a year ago, most of the talk I found on forums signalled that Chessbase remained indifferent to the android and iOS markets. Hopefully this marks a shift in thinking. I would love to have more Chessbase facilities on my iPad and Android phone. I envisage that most of the processing and memory power benefits with PC's could simply be outsourced to the cloud. Surely there is no reason why you couldn't have just as sophisticated software on your tablet or smart phone without any loss in performance due to lack of processing power? For instance, imagine sending a game to a Chessbase server to have it returned with full analysis from Rybka in about the same time it takes to analyse a game at home on the PC. If you play in a chess league then you could do this with your opponent in the post mortem. Or, you could analyse your games in-between matches at a tournament. All you would need to have is an internet connection.
Perhaps this is an idea for chess.com? P.S. does live chess have a release date yet?
I’d venture the opinion that the technology that could exist now will take a long time to come about. This is understandable because many of the more serious chess players (who play in leagues and tournaments and work for Chessbase and other publishing houses) seem to be way behind the times. I take my iPad with me to league games and many people don't even know what it is or what it can do. I’m of the opinion that change will be driven by the likes of Chess.com users and the users of other internet communities who access their subscriptions from their tablets and smart phones and begin to see the benefits for these types of tools.