If you are on a Mac, Vektor3 Chess. It is small, simple and let's you enter/follow a game that branches variations several levels deep.
It is not free, but inexpensive.
Utilities to aid when reading a book
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I do the following..I find the game on chessgames.com and save it on chessbase. Then while reading the book, I enter the variations and sometimes add notes. Once the game is saved, I think I could use fritz to play it out but I haven't tried that yet....No its not free but that's my setup.
Ittayd wrote:
I second scid. It's free and does everything you want. What you should also do is search around for some big PGN collection of famous games. You may also be able to find PGN databases for the various books you have. You can then either search for the game you're looking at and use the computer board to play through it and its variations or use the book-specific database to do so (if you have it). Worst case scenario, you set up the position and make the moves on the computer board yourself. It's very easy to do exactly what you're wanting to do.
Most GUIs can do this. I use WinBoard (XBoard on Mac) for the purpose.
gzthompson wrote:
I second scid. It's free and does everything you want. What you should also do is search around for some big PGN collection of famous games. You may also be able to find PGN databases for the various books you have. You can then either search for the game you're looking at and use the computer board to play through it and its variations or use the book-specific database to do so (if you have it). Worst case scenario, you set up the position and make the moves on the computer board yourself. It's very easy to do exactly what you're wanting to do.
http://www.pgnmentor.com/files.html
Hi
I'm a novice chess player. When I try to read chess books it is hard for me to follow the chess games they present. Things like 'if 14...e4 then 15.Kh5 Rg1 16.Bd4 wins a pawn'. I simply loose track of what is going on in the game and then the book's analysis becomes worthless.
So I'm looking for software aids. Preferably with these features:
1. read a game from a database (are there such database?). So that if the book presents some game from 1911, I don't need to go through all the steps of the game and can immediately reach the interesting positions (I found that many times the diagrams that accompany the game description in a book do not show all the interesting stages of the game)
2. allow to continue with variations and then get back to the branch point.
3. allow to start playing vs the computer. so if i'm thinking of a step to do in some stage, see why it is not good (because the computer will probably find the counter move i don't see)
4. freeware.
Thanks
Ittay