I took up chess about a year ago. I have read a few books such as logical chess move by move, Bobby Fischer teaches chess, and a world champions guide to chess. I also recently bought chessmaster 10 edition. At any rate, I have a few questions. I beat chessmaster in a game. This was the highest rating I have won.
He was playing as Josh Waitzin at nine years old. The computers rating was `1800. Is this a good win for a relative beginner? Is 1800 a high rating? What is the average rating of a chess club member? Is this rating of 1800 for the computer accurate? Does it compare to 1800 in the real world?
I think that's a good result for a beginner no doubt. However Chessmaster does not blunder like a human. Human blunders have an idea behind them, it is only a poorly analyzed idea. Chessmaster on the other hand may give free pieces without a hint of logic.
In any case, CM's ratings are not equivalent to RHP or OTB ratings. I've beatn 2000+ personalities in CM and I certainly don't think they play as well as even 1700 rated humans. Not only that, they don't play in the same way.
Beating chessmaster in the "personality" mode means nothing, and the rating estimations are worthless. The program is just set up to play a crappy game.
Play chessmaster in it's normal full-strength mode at 5 sec/move, if you can beat that, you're doing pretty good.
1800 is a very strong club player, many people play all their lives and never get anywhere close to it.
Based on what you stated you did not beat ChessMaster 10. You lowered is power and beat that. Try ChessMaster 10 the King and try that and you will get a reality check? P.S. You may be playing well for your experience level. I have no books all I have done is look at GM games and played a lot of games.
exigentsky said it well: the personalities are programmed to make random blunders. The ratings are arbitrary. It matters a great deal what sort of box CM runs on. I routinely clobbered Josh, age 9 on my Pentium I (CM 7000) a few years ago, but found him much tougher when I upgraded to a Pentium III. On the machines of today, young Josh is tougher yet, but still far below the rating assigned.
With CM X, I've mostly played Vlad on my P-IV. Vlad is interesting because "he" plays slightly offbeat openings, but always introduces an unsound theoretical novelty around move 5 or 6. Vlad's positional sense is what you might expect from a 1200 player, but he plays a good tactical game. It's good training for punishig positional errors, but entirely unrealistic vis-a-vis human play.
The personality settings in Chessmaster are a joke, they are designed to screw up and make bad moves. Shun them, play CM in it's strongest mode and learn from a good program setting. Chessmaster is a good program, not the equal of shredder, junior, hiarcs, fritz, etc., but awfully damn good as long as you don't weaken it. CM beat Larry Christiansen in a 6 game match a few years back.
Originally posted by gambit3I think that Chessmaster is a terrific program, and has some advantages for novice players vis-a-vis Fritz and Co. Although the "personalities" make egregious errors, they do not all make the same errors.
You players keep slaming the ChessMaster personalities. Perhaps ChessMaster's weakness is its strength as for as its targeted sales group goes? ChessMaster's database, analyzed games, and tutoral make it worth the cost to have it?
The lessons by Waitzkin and others are quite good, and cover elementary principles in a way that Fritz lacks.
OTOH, CM's database functions and environment are pathetic. The board is tiny, and the search functions lack essential capabilities. If you want a database, you're much better off shelling out the additional money for Fritz.
Originally posted by WulebgrYou did not make a statement about the analyzed games. I dearly love to go through great GM level games that are analyzed at a GM level. Too me a great GM game would be a game like the game when Botvinnikat the age of about 14 beat Capablanca or when Reti beat Capablanca ending his winning streak. This Reti game is beautiful work of art and science.To me playing a dumbed down Fritz is not the same fun as playing the personalities in ChessMaster. By the way SSDF states that the big dog is Rybka 1.2 at a rateing of 2931. This is of course not a ELO rateing.
I think that Chessmaster is a terrific program, and has some advantages for novice players vis-a-vis Fritz and Co. Although the "personalities" make egregious errors, they do not all make the same errors.
The lessons by Waitzkin and others are quite good, and cover elementary principles in a way that Fritz lacks.
OTOH, CM's database functions and envir ...[text shortened]... If you want a database, you're much better off shelling out the additional money for Fritz.
Originally posted by gambit3Actually that is an ELO rating.
You did not make a statement about the analyzed games. I dearly love to go through great GM level games that are analyzed at a GM level. Too me a great GM game would be a game like the game when Botvinnikat the age of about 14 beat Capablanca or when Reti beat Capablanca ending his winning streak. This Reti game is beautiful work of art and science.To me pl ...[text shortened]... states that the big dog is Rybka 1.2 at a rateing of 2931. This is of course not a ELO rateing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
And no playing Chessmaster personalities is not useful in the slightest. They do not play like humans any more than the Fritz ones do.