I learned with CM6000 which I think it was pretty good; a friend of mine had CM9000 on ps2 we got bored to tears with that one, it took a couple of minutes just to make the 1st couple of moves and the tutorials weren't that good with that one (thank God I didn't get it 🙂 as of CM GM edition I would be interested if it had more annotated games from Josh
peace
Originally posted by gritI was always under the impression that Chessmaster was geared to the casual player, while programs like Fritz were for the serious student of the game.
So many people are raving about the Chessmaster Grandmaster edition, 11, and I wonder if there is that much difference in that and my CM 9000?
Please advise.
grit
Regarding whether to buy the latest edition of any engine, your pretty much paying for something you already own. Bar a few more bells n whistles added by the developers to push the product as “new and improved”.
It’s a bit like those adverts you see on TV for washing detergents. Their always claiming that the product gets your clothes even whiter, as if they are admitting that what they were selling before was substandard
Originally posted by lordgledhillThe King engine is one of the strongest in the world. The default settings in CM9000 aren't the strongest. The CM9 SKR settings puts it right up there with the elite. If you wish to try them to see if this isn't so here are the parameters.
I have CM9000 and the tutorials by Josh Waitzkin and the various other learning tools are great, but if you're looking for something with which to analyze or even just play against then why not go for an engine like Fritz/Rybka/Shredder or any number of free and very strong engines that can be found online?
CM9 SKR Report
(strongest setting at higher time controls)
****************************************************
CM9 SKR.CMP
Created by Sedat Canbaz, Kurt Utzinger, Rolf Buehler
[Setting under CM9-GUI]
****************************************************
A/D (Attack/Defender) [ -2] M/P (Material/Position) [ 0]
S/P (Strength of Play) [ 100] C/C (Control of Center) [ 105/105]
Rand (Randomness) [ 0] MOB (Mobility) [ 110/110]
MSD (Max Search Depth) [ 99] K/S (King Safety) [ 155/155]
SS (Selective Search) [ 12] P/P (Passed Pawns) [ 100/100]
C/D (Contempt for Draw) [ 0] P/W (Pawn Weakness) [ 100/100]
OWN OPPONENT
Queen [ 9.1] Queen [ 9.0]
Rook [ 5.0] Rook [ 5.0]
Bishop [ 3.0] Bishop [ 3.0]
Knight [ 3.0] Knight [ 3.0]
Pawn [ 1.0] Pawn [ 1.0]
Based on this thread and a few others I've read, I just got CM 10. Mostly I was just curious to watch the tutorials. I still use Arena or Fritz for actual chess work and play, but maybe I'll give some of the CM personalities a try.
For me, CM 10 seemed to be a decent compromise between price, trying to avoid too many bugs, getting decent tutorials, and getting a decent GUI that isn't too messed up (I guess the CM 9 GUI would have been best, but ya can't have everything.)
The first thing I did (other than installing the three patches) was to add some decent 2D board designs from user-created sources. I thought the 2D sets that came with CM 10 were few and not very good.
The only reason that I've never bought a CM before is that my operating system (Win 2000) isn't officially supported by Ubisoft, and I wasn't sure if it would run on my PC. But the demo ran, so I decided to take the gamble. It seems to work just fine on my system, although I've heard that some Win 2000 users have had problems. I don't particularly care that the game.exe file chews up a lot of CPU resources all the time even if the engine isn't running, but I guess I can live with that. (Apparently it does that on all OSs.)
So I'm now a member of the Chessmaster nation. (Is that a good thing, or not? Idk.) But yeah, the GUI does have a "gamer" feel to it, and there are some things about the design that I don't care for, like the fact that it's difficult to use the "TheKing.exe" engine outside of the CM GUI. (I don't think I'm going to bother trying to jump through those hoops - too much work.)