What makes chessBase worth the price?

I'm a bit ignorant about the features of ChessBase. Some say it has revolutionary features indispensable for a serious player. My coach said that you can search by pawn structures and other stuff like that.

So can anyone advise me on this matter? Your help is greatly appreciated.

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Chess is Siege Warfare in the form of a game.  Knights like in the times of King Arthur would surround a castle.  They would not allow food or water into the castle.  Eventually the people inside the castle would have to come out.  In chess thru the use of restrain, blockade, and execute the enemy position you are squeezing the King out of your opponent's position.

Chessbase teaches you who, what when, where and how to squeeze the enemy's position in order to extract the enemy king.  In the process you will learn 4 different types of visualization pattern memory banks which you will concentrate on accumulating them in your brain:

1. Tactics visualization pattern memory banks

2. Endgame visualization pattern memory banks

3. Opening visualization pattern memory banks

4. Middlegame visualization pattern memory banks.

You will also learn important facts such as to pinpoint the first move of the middlegame.

How worthwhile it is of course depends on how much you would actually use it. And there are a lot of overlaps with the features of Fritz 16, which is cheaper. I own and use both. I'm only a C class player (USCF 1437 from way back in the 80s and very early 90s when I was playing tournament chess). But I still find it extremely useful.

 

1) It allows you to record your games and extensively annotate them. People often talk about how annotating your games is one of the key ways to improve. This makes doing so easier. There is chess engine assistance as well if you so desire (the normal recommendation is to annotate by yourself, then let the chess engine look at it as well to find things you overlooked.). For example, in a recent game I overlooked a tactical shot I had that would have made winning easier. I didn't find that shot when I was annotating later, either.

 

2) It allows searching through databases of games in numerous ways. One of the ways I use it is to look at how other people (stronger the better) handled a position. This is quite useful to look at typical middle game plans that flow out of an opening that you played.

 

3) One of the ways that is often mentioned as key to improving is looking over Grandmaster games. If you have a large database of games, this becomes very easy to do.

 

For me, this was money very well spent.

 

You will probably get people telling you not to bother until you get fairly strong. I disagree.

i dont have chessbase (i use an ios database software called chess studio)

and just the feature (as a strictly chess.com app user) of loading my games into a database and doing “analysis”/commentary on the games (coming from a noob who would have legal pads filled with my game analysis only to be discarded later) is a huge benefit

my coach insisted i get chess software since i was basically sending him an analysis done on the “inotes” and sent to him in an email- with a separate pgn attached

now i can have all my games organized however i want, can easily and much more efficiently annotate my games, plus the added benefit of having a database of all kinds of other games so i have access to all of that too

i was amazed at how much better my study is streamlined

now, add all of this with these other features the previous poster have mentioned and it sounds like chessbase is pretty solid