There are lots of really good free stuff available.
For GUI, use Scid or Arena, I prefer SCID, most others seem to prefer Arena.
Free engines are Houdini, Stockfish, Robolito.[edit I doubt Toga would make it into the top 20 nowadays]
Also get a good database so you can build a decent tree to guide you through the openings.
Thanks for the quick response. I have heard of Arena, maybe I will try that and see if it's just an issue with me using or reading the GUI. As far as Toga, I'm using to my knowledge to newest version; Toga II 1.6.3 or something (2007). It's suppose to be rated at like 2800 or something; has it really fallen that much?
LOL, I think Houdini is about 3300. Seriously, it's currently the strongest engine out there, and free.
Maybe you should get Scid and arena, I have both. Arena is good if you like to play against engines, or want engines to play against each other.
Scid (for me) is far superior in its database functions, training tools and general file management.
Like all chess GUI's, both are a bit of a pain to set up correctly, but you will always get help in these forums, I know there is a group for Scid users here, maybe arena has one too.
Hello all,
I am hoping someone can help me find a software that analyzes chess positions and gives you the best move and rates the moves based on a given and editable board. It would be great if I could also feed it a game in chess notation and it give me some sort of english feedback in terms of it being a bad move or if there was a better move I should have made at a certain point, but this is less important at the moment.
I found the website chesslab.com, which is almost perfect. It lets me enter the positions, gives me 2-4 moves and variations, and scores/rates the moves. The problem is it is web hosted, so it is somewhat slow, and it is always busy/unavailable.
Next I tried just downloading a straight engine and GUI, I selected Toga II as my engine and I am currently using Babaschess as the GUI. However I feel like I am either using the software wrong or reading the output wrong. At one point it had me randomly sacrifice a queen with no followup moves, and I testing it against Chess Titans level 10, and it lost twice. I do not know what engine chesslab uses, but it beat Titans at level 10, and I am also led to believe that Toga II is suppose to be one of the better engines out there.
Now neither of these give any feedback to my knowledge besides the scoring of the moves (although even choosing the best moves on Toga led to a loss), but again that is less important at the moment. I know Chess.com offers analysis of games you play on here, but I don't think I'm ready to play on here and I don't think I can feed it external game data. I am also looking for something more realtime and usable offline. Hopefully downloadable software so I don't have to deal with server busy stuff like chesslab. Ideally looking for freeware, or at least something that has a free demo I can download and try out, in case it isn't quite what I'm looking for. Would rather not buy something at Best Buy or wherever since it would be nonreturable if I don't like it.
Might be asking for a lot here, but I figured if anyone had seen such an item this would be the place to ask.
P.S. I have Chess Mentor... great software. Obviously doesn't do what I'm describing here but thought I would mention it.