1st choice in a Chess Program @Amazon

I was just over at Amazon and am interested in either Fritz 14, Rybka or Houdini..  What would someone recommend as a first choice, and if needed a why.  thx!

get a free engine like stockfish and a free interface like Arena.  ...noob

lol, ok wow i see that.. and I thank u 2 !!  hope my basic i3 laptop can handle it 

Chess Partner 2000 is where it's at these days.

nah I'm good on that.  I'm finding I somewhat prefer closed positions.  After an opening exchange I am not sure if certain prefered positions are equal and what not and would like to see what the box says.

Stockfish and Scid vs. PC is my favorite setup. We have a very long and informative thread on Scid vs. PC in this forum, and I have a few notes on analyzing with Stockfish.

You can use all sorts of engines with Scid vs. PC as well; I use Shredder a good bit as well.

yes I am over there right now, this site is Huge.. anyone see any problems with my having a 6 g ram , 2.4 processor a problem.  I thought I read somewhere chess engines took a lot of juice to run?

yes chess engines use a lot of pc resources but practically any computer can run one.  you should have no problem.  only problem is if you are try to use chess engine and use another program at the same time.  

That shouldn't be a problem. Just be sure you're not running the engine on too many threads, otherwise the PC might get sluggish or might overheat. I think the latest Stockfish version defaults to one thread, so it should work fine unless you increase the threads too much.

Fritz 12.  Under $10.   Load it up with Houdini 1.5 and whatever other free engines you can find.

Money to burn?   Add HIARCS and ChessKing for maybe $50 each.  HIARCS is easy to use and Chessking is fun.  Both are genuinely useful training aids.  Have fun!

Now that Fritz 14 is out, I would presume Fritz 13 will be on sale. I bought it a few months back and iIve never regretted it. You can load almost any engine you wish in to Fritz.

I also really like Arena as a free option. The graphics are good and you can load virtually any engine into it as well. I still use Arena on occasion.

The top three free to download engines at the moment are Stockfish, Bouquet and Gull. They made the top six in the TCEC engine tournament. Stockfish was in the final against the winner(a pay for engine) Komodo.

Load Stockfish and a couple other free engines in the program of your choice and you'll have a very fine analysis tool. Just remember you're not allowed to use it during a game! It's for afterward finding your mistakes....

stock fish is pretty strong for a free engine.

+1

I have Shredder, Fritz, WinBoard and a half dozen other interfaces, at least.  But for the past year or so I've been using Scid vs PC almost exclusively.

Pretty strong?  It is extremely strong period.

Stockfish is currently stronger than all the $$$ engines listed so far in this thread, including Houdini, so, yeah, I guess you could say "pretty strong"...

Well, that's certainly debateable.  The latest versions of Houdini and Komodo appear to be just as strong, if not stronger.  But any strength differences are VERY minor.

You probably heard that Komodo won the most recent TCEC tournament:

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

Yes, Komodo won. Stockfish came in second. The top six were Komodo, Stockfish, Houdini, Hiarcs, Gull and Bouquet. Stockfish, Gull and Bouquet being the free engines in the finals. Of those six it came down to Komodo and Stockfish dualing it out in the championship round.

I don't think one could go wrong with any of those engines doing an analysis. The difference between them is extremely small. Perhaps a couple of games one way or the other.

Thank you all, and @SpiritBro77 I am think I'll do Arena and order Fritz 14 to boot.  As for engines start with Stockfish and go from there?  Tommorow so I'll probably play around and see how it goes.  

Well, that's certainly debateable.

Komodo was not mentioned until after my post ;), and Stockfish is stronger than every other engine, so...not really debateable at all in this case.

Why get Fritz 14?  Arena is a free chess interface that can play any engine and Stockfish is a super strong free engine.  Unless there is some chess-teaching activities on Fritz 14 that I'm not aware of, it seems like a waste of money.