Free chess engine?

Enjoy your thread full of endless crap advice that will never help you improve.

hmmm , how many girls do you know?

Lucas Chess is a free download that will analyze your game among other things. Game analysis helps you with the openings and shows you better moves than the ones you made and is very good for showing you tricks and traps that you could have played as well as showing you stragems that might have worked better in your game. All of this information should hopefully improve your chess. As for gm's not being able to make a living, let them get jobs instead of playing games for a living. 

Well I have never met a girl who would be impressed by watching me beat a chess engine that's for sure.

Sorry but that was actually directed at Somebodysson who blocked me and now refuses to unblock me long enough for me to untrack his thread.

But to comment on your post anyway I think the only way you can use an engine to help you improve is for post-game analysis.  Playing an engine will not really help you improve anything but how to beat an engine.  If you want the greatest benefit from an engine then do your own analysis and compare it with the engine's choice.  If it's different, try the move you decided was best instead.  What does the engine think of it?  If the engine doesn't like it, investigate the reason why.  If the engine plays a move you completely overlooked, investigate it.  Honestly I think at least 50% of improving is just thorough post-game analysis and the powerful engines we have free access to now are invaluable to this pursuit.  People 50 years (even 20 years ago) could only dream of a day where they could be told super-GM moves by a machine.

The problem with trying to improve your chess with engine evaluations is that you aren't an engine and will never be attuned to its ways of finding good moves.  So you may think you understand the engine's intentions until it plays some crazy move and then you are left scratching your head.  "Why is this odd looking move better than the simple and effective move I had planned?", you might ask yourself.  The problem is no matter how long you spend trying to emulate the engine, you can't do it.  You will only confuse yourself.  Humans learn in patterns.  Clean development can't be bad here, there's no way black can defend against this attack with so many of my pieces on the kingside, white can't afford to give up the DSB with the dark squared weaknesses he has, etc. etc.

Well explained! I could not add anything more.

The main thing I find useful about engines is finding missed tactics after a game.  These include many little combinations for positional gains that you don't see during a game.

Tell that to Tal!

Computers find their moves by dead reckoning. They analyze thousands of lines and select the best one. Humans find moves by using general principles to select candidate moves and analyze those moves. But even though humans and machines find their moves using different methods they often find the same moves! A good move is a good move and a bad move is a bad move no matter how you find it. And the whole idea of chess is to find good moves. When I am analyzing with Lucas and Lucas gives a move I don't understand, I look at the lines given for that move and try to understand the logic and reason behind that move. And by analyzing lines of moves that I made that the computer deemed to be wrong I look at the lines of analysis and try to find the reason why this move was wrong. In this way we can improve our game without memorization. 

I love Bronstein's quote about Tal...

"you want to know how Tal wins?  It's very simple, he arranges his pieces in the centre and then sacrifices them somewhere."

thank you for your kind words. You didnt exacty think that you'd be allowed to carry on on that thread the way you were, insulting people, posting inflammatory and obnoxious posts indefinitely, did you? I guess you didn't know that a person could be blocked. Its exactly lke the real world. If you're in someone's house and you're acting in ways that are against the interests of the occupants, you're going to get kicked out of the house. That's what happened.

Frankly, I have no reason to trust you long enough to unblock you so that you can untrack; youre likely to post a sickening obnoxious parting shot, claiming, as the fox in the fable that its 'in your nature'. I'm not going to risk it. Maybe you will learn from this experience. 

I'm a little depressed I wasted so much time writing in it to begin with.

not as depressed as I was when I realized that someone who had been struggling to be a generous contributor, failed. Your posts were inconsistent; some were serious, generous, scholarly; others were infantile, petulant and inflammatory. I tried to keep you on for as lomg as I could, and only blocked you when the outcry against you was threatening the well-being on the thread. You were the first block I had done; I learned how to do it in order to block you. It wasn't fun, but it was effective. 

I don't care that you blocked me.  The tracking is annoying.  We're done here.

you can request of staff in a private message that they untrack you from threads you've been blocked from.