I use Chessmaster, the Grandmaster Edition to analyze all my games. I've been hearing a lot about Fritz and how great it is for analyzing games. At the level that I am at, roughly in the mid 1400s, is it worth investing the money to buy Fritz, or is Chessmaster enough. What does fritz have that Chessmaster doesn't?
Originally posted by hintjulyeah, who are you, a 779 rated player, telling a 1450 or so there not very good and then to give them chess advice...really!
your not very good, I suggest you concentrate on your endgame skills, buy a good endgame book, it is better than using fritz.
Originally posted by JakalI have CM10, and I tried analyzing with it once. What a pain in the you-know-what! The analysis may be OK (although I didn't really pay attention to what it was saying), but just the mechanics of doing the analysis was not very ergonomic (efficient).
I use Chessmaster, the Grandmaster Edition to analyze all my games. I've been hearing a lot about Fritz and how great it is for analyzing games. At the level that I am at, roughly in the mid 1400s, is it worth investing the money to buy Fritz, or is Chessmaster enough. What does fritz have that Chessmaster doesn't?
Having said that, I also have Fritz 8, and some of the menu structuring of F8 seems very non-intuitive to me. (Or maybe I just don't think like Germans. 🙂 ) The F12 GUI was redesigned, so I'd hope that it's more intuitive, but I have no idea about that.
What kind of analysis do you do? Is it just blunder checking to see what tactics you've missed? (That's all I use engine analysis for.) If so, I suspect Fritz would be overkill. Maybe you could try the free Arena 2.0.1 at www.playwitharena.com. Click on the "Arena Downloads" link on the left of the page, then download the "Arena 2.0.1 Setup" file.
Arena won't give you any verbal analysis, but it will spot the tactical blunders. One bug I noticed with Arena is that if I added any annotation symbols to a game and then saved it to a PGN file, it will save the annotation symbols to the file - BUT, when I reload the game file, the annotation symbols don't appear in the Arena window. I've checked all the settings that I can find - It just seems to be a bug as far as I can tell.
"What kind of analysis do you do? Is it just blunder checking to see what tactics you've missed?"
I analyze my games from opening to end game. I like to read and listen to Chessmaster's recommendations for specific moves, especially blunders. Then I play against the computer starting from the corrected blunder position to see what might have been.
I also pat myself on the back for a good move, which positively reinforces my good play.
I just want to know if Fritz offers something that Chessmaster doesn't.
I will check out Arena.
- Joined
- 25 Jul 07
- Moves
- 27921
The main feature that Fritz has that CM doesn't is 'deep position analysis'. This is useful for seeing which side is 'winning' in a given position, which can be useful for analysing adjourned OTB games.
For example, if an OTB game has stopped due to reaching the end of its session, then the game can either be adjourned (play resumes later), or adjudicated (a third party analysises the position and decides who has won). This is where deep position analysis is useful - Fritz will look over all the main lines in the position and ascribe a final 'score', in terms of +/-1, were +1 is roughly equivalent to white being ahead by 1 pawn.
Of course, if the game is continued, club-level human players will normally deviate quickly from the optimal lines that Fritz chose, so the results should be taken with a pinch of salt, rather than as a guarantee of which side is winning. Anything less than +/- 2 is still hard to convert into a win, in general - at least for us mortals.
So - I'd say that's the difference between CM and Fritz analysis. For analysing whole games, they are pretty much the same, but for analysing one position in detail, Fritz is better.
Hope that helps ...
