Best 5 free Chess Software

http://www.mediafire.com/download/b55eedbpn3dd16t/LucasChessPortable9step5.exe

http://lucaschess.blogspot.com

I downloaded LucasChessPortable9step5.exe and put it on flashdrive K. It created Folder K:\LucasChess. I deleted the downloaded exe file from K:

I opened Lucas Chess by clicking on the icon for Lucas.exe in the LucasChess folder, and I clicked on the Lucas.exe icon in that folder and clicked on Play to configure the program to play white, Engine: Rybka 2.3.2a 32-bit; time 5 sec; resign never; strength high level; hints  0.

I copied a FEN string into memory. and clicked ctrl-V on the Lucas window.  Nothing happens.  What am I doing wrong?  I have a Windows 7 system on a computer that is a couple years old. My tentative conclusion is that I Lucas Chess will not work.  Can someone suggest anything better than Mayura to load FEN strings and play?

Stockfish is best for club players because it is free and reliable in strength.

I have finally figured out that you have to actually paste the fen string into the start position box.  In Mayura it is simpler because you can just paste the string by clicking ctrl-v anywhere in the mayura window.  I will now proceed to evaluate the program and will then post my conclusions sometime after I return from Chess Club today in a couple hours.

1. start lucas chess 8. then go to, tools > Database > Positions . a new window will come.

2. here you can create any position by clicking. or paste FEN position.

3. you can play that position with any engine. click Accept.

4. now, you can analyse or play that position. to play, move a piece if its your turn.

5. then, Utilities > play current position.

    select engine, and strength.

**note that you have to select the engine level, near to the player.

  the engine Rybka is stronger than GrandMasters.

  in the engine selection box, you can set Rybka's strength to the lowest

but its still higher than average school students.

so, you may want to install a free weak engine (elo 700 to 1200) for beginners.

here, http://www.computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/404/

green and orange engines are free, try to intall one or two of them.

if you can successfully do all these, zip the folder, distribute it by a usb drive or CDs.

Thank u

looking 4 these for a long time

One friendly bit of advice - The pitfall of blindly picking engines near the bottom of that rating list is that a distressingly high percentage of them are buggy in some way. It only stands to reason...Engines that are that weak tend to be written by people who are learning to write engines and who may not know how to properly debug their engines. A few other people have discovered this problem. If interested, you can search for "Battle of the Forgotten" and "Tony's no play list" threads on the Talkchess forums.

As a follow-up to #125 I find Lucas Chess to be a good program, but it is a little more difficult to paste a fen string into than Mayura.  In Mayura, you simply copy a fen string from any source and then use ctrl-v to paste that position anywhere in the Mayura window.  Also, Lucas does not have convenient forward and reverse arrows to move back a step at a time through a game in progress, and it is more difficult to re-start on an alternate path. I intend to continue to train my third to fifth grade students with both programs and to encourage them to install their preference at home for study outside chess club hours.

Chess Titans is preinstalled in windows 7. it has 10 level of difficulty. level 1 is very suitable for beginners. it is not timed. usually i beat level 10. but i  lose if i play @3|0 blitz speed.

holy ugly pieces batman

I am trying to find the best free or cheap simple program for 8-10 year old kids to use at school chess club and at home.  Some of the kids have computers at home but no internet access. Many do not have English speaking parents. I can get past the no-internet problem by loaning or giving them $3 USB flashdrives with installation instructions to put the program on their home computers.

I have looked briefly at Tarrasch, latest version (maybe).  It now has an engine to play against, and the GUI looks nice, but I haven't yet found a way to copy and paste a FEN string and play against it.  Maybe I'm opverlooking something.  I also am not yet able to set the engine to move against me in a fixed amount of time.  It allows PGN files, which Lucas does not seem to want to accommodate easily (again, maybe I'm overlooking something).

In my opinion, most of these programs have too many bells and whistles, making them difficult to learn.  My quest remains to find a program that shows a realistic looking 2d chessboard with white and black pieces and a green and white chessboard (like the $10 sets we use in chess club).  I also want the ability to easily load pgn and fen files, set the engine to respond quickly, be able to move back and forth through a game and explore variations, etc. Any suggestions?  

So far, Mayura fits the bill pretty well functionally, except that its GUI looks very mid-to-late 20th century (tiny board, only one ugly color choice).  For an iPad/iPhone, the best program I have found is tChess Pro for ten bucks or so.  Few if any of of my kids have iPhones or iPads

for iPhone/Android you can give a look at

Play Magnus — Magnus Carlsen

Tools - PGN Viewer

The more I mess with chessx, the better I like it, except when I hate it. previously, I was able to get the engine to respond to every move, but now after I move I have to click on an opponent's piece to get the engine to move it.  How do I configure it so it will auto-repond like it was doing earlier today?

Pawpatrol

OK, I loaded a pgn file, but now I don't know how to play forward against the computer from that start position.  It won't let me move any piece. Very frustrating that developers don't seem interested in writing a basic instruction manual.  I have several thousand pgn games with starting positions that I want to play from.

Utilities - Play current position

A simple chess gui--winboard.

Have you tried Arena? Yeah, it's complicated to set up, but if you're willing to do it for the kids, then it might be an answer. You can make the board green and white if you want that.

http://www.playwitharena.com/

We have experimented with Arena at school.  Nice looking GUI. Main drawbacks; 1. complicated, 2. Freezes occasionally and has to be restarted.

Regardins SCID, I haven't worked much with it, but I haven't yet found a way to paste a FEN string and play from there, so that has cooled my interest. I might gravitate toward scid and just fold my FENs into to pgn files, but that's a major pain in the butt, in my opinion. Am I the only chess coach who thinks it great to be able to load a practice game with a simple ctrl-c, ctrl-v and start playing?  Mayura fits that bill perfectly(except for the tiny ugly board layout). Then when you mess up, you just hit ctrl-v again to reload the problem.

Use SCID vs. PC instead of SCID if you haven't.  This might work in SCID, too, but in scid vs pc to play against the computer from a fen position, just paste the fen with ctrl+shift+v, Play - Computer (UCI Engine) and select play from current position from the dialog.