Im in the same boat, I downloaded it yesterday. I think its cool that it comes with so many games. The gui has a face only a mother could love though. I have imported a few of my better engines like Rybka into the interface, but its hard to understand the analysis because its all numbers. The interface looks like the old school winboard. And I keep having to adjust the screen because its too small out of the box. And to see the computer analysis takes a lot of moving around the other box. But its free. Im going to spend $26.00 dollars and buy MasterChess 6000 though, and use Bookup 2000 pro as my database program. I would like to get Chessbase but it is out of my price range at the moment. The new Rybka comes with 4 million games, but Im not sure if its a crippled version of Chess Assistant or not.
Anyone have experience with ChessDB?
I'll keep messing with it and post here when I figure out anything useful. If you got to Tools>Download Games From, you can get a huge database of master games (can choose 100,000, or 3.6 million). So I got those, now I just have to figure out how to do searches, references etc. I'm not even certain how exactly people use programs like ChessBase and stuff, but I'll try and read up on it.
I have to look into something like this as well. I probably don't have the money for chessbase either. I wonder how much you can get out of the opening database of this website? I am not a member so I wouldn't know, ugh ... but if I find out anything about anything I will keep you guys informed.
I use chessDB all the time. -- To research say win/loss percentage in a specific line, open the DB that you are looking to use (the large master DB, a DB of your own games, what ever you want). Then, and this is important, go to file -> Read-only.... (this ensures you don't mess up the DB). Next, play out the moves to the position you want to research. Now, in the top row of icons, I believe its the third from the left, is an icon of what looks like a brown tree w/ no leaves, click this. Depending on the size of the DB, the program may take a few seconds at this point, but when it is done, it will give you a number of relevant stats about the current position. Including win/loss stats for the next move, etc.
Baseballfan wrote:
I use chessDB all the time. -- To research say win/loss percentage in a specific line, open the DB that you are looking to use (the large master DB, a DB of your own games, what ever you want). Then, and this is important, go to file -> Read-only.... (this ensures you don't mess up the DB). Next, play out the moves to the position you want to research. Now, in the top row of icons, I believe its the third from the left, is an icon of what looks like a brown tree w/ no leaves, click this. Depending on the size of the DB, the program may take a few seconds at this point, but when it is done, it will give you a number of relevant stats about the current position. Including win/loss stats for the next move, etc.
Thanks for posting that info... Since making this post, I've started to use chessDB a lot and I must say it's an invaluable teaching tool. I've found that what you can do is set up a specific position (for convenience using PGN or FEN) and in a few seconds get 100s of master games that have the exact same position. So say you played a certain opening and then didn't know how to plan from there... well just play a couple of the master games and you can see where they attacked, what files they opened, where their pieces exerted the most power etc. Then when you get in that position again in the future, you have a plan at least because you've seen it played out before. I was totally clueless trying to analyze my games in the past, now I can see what I did right or wrong by comparing my moves to the strongest players.
It's a free alternative to ChessBase. I want to start making use of a chess database, so that I can quickly access master games in my opening lines, and also reference my win loss percentages in various lines. At the moment the program is downloading a database of 3.6 million high rated games... How do I go about doing the above things? I've looked over the tutorials and am rather baffled, but will try again tomorrow after getting some sleep. Any adept users of ChessDB that have easy to follow instructions on how to use it for improvement?