Help With Fritz 12

Hey everyone, today the package came in for my new Fritz 12! If anyone else has it, or any other Fritz, can you please tell how to use to my advantage?

For example, how should I analyze my games and other games with it?

Should I use to train my openings and endgames?

Any help with using Fritz and its features would be a great help to me, thanks!

You should have gotten Fritz 13 if you had a choice. It's much better.

Luckily I have Fritz 12!

So basically, to keep all my games together and to get it analyzed (loose scoresheets are not what I use, I prefer a 100 game scorebook).

To enter a new game, use the key combo (Ctrl+N) for a new game, but don't play a move  otherwise Fritz will play a move. You press (Shift+Ctrl+M) to turn off the engine. Then you enter your game, save it into your new database, and enter all the game info, like your name, your opponent's name, Rating, date, round #, name of the tournament, etc. Then you press (Ctrl+Y) for analysis and select a threshold (deepness). For your level 30 is enough, for my level I usually set the threshold higher for deeper analysis. Then you press (Ctrl+R) to save the analysis. Then you go through the analysis (Having the engine window at the corner of your screen helps) and look at your bad moves, and what your opponent did wrong, too. 

For openings, what I do (if I'm worried about a move, or wonder what I should play), I open the main engine window and it tells me 3 or 4 playable moves. Even though one may give my opponent a slightly bigger advantage (+0.1 more) I still choose it because it suits my style and I like it better. Don't always choose the top engine move!

That's pretty much all I do with Fritz, for playing I play on chess.com.

You might also explore using other engines with the Fritz interface.  I plugged in the free version of the Houdini engine and use it to compare suggested moves against the other engines.  Most of the time when Houdini suggests a different move than Fritz it's a better move.  Houdini also allows you to incorporate an endgame database so when you get down to the last 4 or 5 pieces on the board it will ALWAYS give you the best move.

The Fritz engine and GUI have been Nalimov tablebase compatible for a loooong time.

I have Fritz 12 but I use Houdini 2.0 as the main engine.  The best thing about the Fritz packages is that you can just use the interface and swap other stronger engines with it.    I tried scid, but found the interface counter intuitive so I went back to the chessbase interface.  Arena is another free alternative you can look into. 

I will say that I prefer scid on my Android devices compared to chessbase.

I use Fritz 13 and it is essentially the same as Fritz 12 with some added features and updates.  I also have SCID and SCID vs. PC with multiple engines.  I'm sorry @jivepar but I don't see anything that SCID does that Fritz does not do, and quite a few things Fritz will do that SCID doesn't.