Chessmaster 9000

How do I anylise my games using chessmaster 9000?

So far, i've gone in to chess database, created my own, put the games I want to anylise in it, and then.....I dont know what to do.  The only thing it tells me is the first bad move by either player, I think.

Ty for youre help in advance.

I'm using a mac so if you are using a PC I'm not sure this will be the same but I suspect so.

You have to do analysis via the Game Room.  Start a new game with 2 human players in the game room and input your moves.  Once done, hit the '<<' button in the game status menu to take you back to the initial position.  Then, from the 'Mentor' pull down menu, select 'Game Analysis'.  Input your desired time to think about each move and wait.  When the analysis is done the annotation window should automatically open.  You'll likely want to use the 'analysis' tab in the annotation menu.  Back in the game status window hit the '<<' button to again revert back to the initial position and now step through the moves one at a time.  Hope this helps.

no no, anylise past games only, thanks alot tmonson, ill try that, tell you if it works...

Is there a way using a pgn file or do I have to input all the moves manually?

You can go to the "Game Room" click on "File" and "Load" your game. Then, click on "Mentor" and then "Game Analysis" and then select the amount of time you want Chessmaster to spend looking at each move of the game. The default is 10 seconds but sometimes I set it to 90 seconds a move and then go watch TV or something while Chessmaster looks over the game. When it is done, you can first see a nice summary report of the game including what mates, if any, you and/or your opponent missed. Then you can go move by move through the game looking at the Chessmaster notes. A lot of the notes are pretty basic but really look for notes that start with "Yikes..." or "Uh-Oh..." those are usually the very informative notes.

In case you may not be aware, when you review a game in Chessmaster but don't like clicking the mouse for every move you can use the keyboard- <ctrl> and R to move forward and <Ctrl> T to move backwards.

Hey,FinFangFoom,lucky that I came across your comment here.

Thanks for the info .

yes, ty very much

only analyse past games, no cheating...

there are many easier ways of cheating, if I was, it would not be like that:) 

Since we're discussion Chessmaster, I have a question too. If people feel a new thread would be more appropriate please say so.

I use Chessmaster 10 and was wondering how people thought the playing strength of the various personalities compares with equivalent rated 'real' oponents, either here or OTB.

 I know there are big differences between real opponents and virtual ones (consistency, style etc) but was just interested in peoples general thoughts.

This has been discussed in other threads but I cannot remeber the view of the public. I find some of the lower rated players to be much stronger than expected.

Thanks for your response Farbror.

 I had a search through past posts and there are (as expected) many differing views. Tying it together you might conclude that the lower rated players were underrated, the high rated players overrated with 1600 seeming to be the sweet spot where playing strength was about right.

Another theme is that the different personalities can vary quite significantly in their relative playing strengths. So, playing a variety of opponents is important.

A final theme is that worrying too much about your rating is a mug's game! And fair enough.

Thanks again, Julian 

Thats very interesting, assuming that it is cheating to get a coach to tell you how or where one makes a mistake. Especially when one wants to avoid theses same mistakes. Why study chess books, to improve ones playing ability. Analysis after a game is only the smart thing to do. When I lose, I know why, but how I got myself in that position is not easy to figure out. Bad openings are usually my downfall, how to avoid these kind of mistakes takes time, and good analysis helps. I dare say that noone goes over their games without some help to study different outcomes. A fool never learns from his mistakes, a smart man learns from his mistakes, and a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. ie Studying the masters .

This is how I analyze my games using Play Chess Deep Fritz, no it's not Fritz 9 but Fritz 8 and should work the same,

- Copy your game from a pgn file (to get a pgn file from chess.com go to one of your games and select the moves tab to the right of the board, at the bottom of the move window click on "get pgn" and save this to your desktop, once you have done this right-click your pgn file and select "open with", select notepad, hold down the "cntrl" key and press the "A" key to copy everything).

 - Start Fritz and click on "Edit", "Paste", "Paste Game", now your game is loaded into Fritz and ready to be analyzed.

- Click on "Tools", "Analysis",  "Full Analysis", select the Calc Time, this is where you need to experiment a little, I set my Calc Time to 10min but I have a very, very fast computer, most should set their Calc Time to 20min and let it run overnight ...this takes a very long time so I recommend you run this before going to bed or work.

the board is too small, how can you zoom , it's only the third of my screen width

thx