Im an older chess player (nearing 50). I want to get better than my 500 elo (on another site). Just curious if Fritz can help increase that by analyzing my games and allowing me to practice tactics. I play online exclusively since I have no one to play and traveling isnt an option to to busy home life.
Im not sure if I should go that route or purchase a course in books or video.
What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance.
Chessbase's Fritz is OK for learning, but the UI is somewhat buggy and unfriendly when displaying and comparing all possible moves, not just the best moves as computed by the engine.
For my own analysis and understanding I prefer Nibbler, which is a free software that can wrap multiple engines, with especially good interface for LC0. The problem with Nibbler is that it takes a while to understand what are those things that it can display you. But once you learn the basic meanings of various displayable quantities it becomes extremely helpful and fast to use. When you configure it to display all possible principal variations (up tp 250 for complex middlegames) it is really educational to see how the moves you were thinking of are ranking on the list of all possible moves.
Nibbler doesn't produce any verbiage or sentences, just displays the chess truth as seen by the engine. Because of the very good interface to LC0 you can use Maia chess engine neural networks that intentionally play like relatively weak humans. In my opinion it is very educational to compare intentionally weak 'human' moves of Maia/LC0 with merciless 'superhuman' efficiency of strong engine like Stockfish.
Interesting, thank you for recommendation. I'm not sure I want something that hardcore, at least not yet. Wanna go slightly simple with an engine that will give me a little verbiage or sentences to help me along my way.
@Lotharen To be honest, imho join a local chessclub and the remain rest will come itself.
Have fun!
@Lotharen said in #3:
> Wanna go slightly simple with an engine that will give me a little verbiage or sentences to help me along my way.
Well, it depends on your learning style.
With Fritz, you'll get feedback (approximately): "You are wrong, here's how you should do it!" with no explanation what you did wrong.
With any UI (like Nibbler) that displays all possible choices you'll get feedback (approximately): "Here's how you could solve it, with each solution showing its grade". You can see explanations for everything, both good and bad.
I find the first style above annoying and learn much faster if I know what I did wrong. You can force Fritz (or similar UI) that just show 1-5 best solutions to also explain "bad moves" by forcing own moves and then doing takebacks. But it becomes annoying slog. And you'll quickly see that Fritz's supposed friendly banter and verbiage is just a repetition of dumb pattern-matches. You'll learn those word patterns quicker that you'll actually learn chess tactics.
@kalafiorczyk Thank you again! I looked into Nibbler and its quite interesting. I have yet to try it out. I wish I could find a standalone program that could analyze like the other chess site I use. It's easy to read and the UI is very clean. Perhaps others, like Nibbler will be a good substitute. I often find the screenshot they use don't do a program justice in many cases.
I think you should play lots of human players. Then you can analyze the games later on.
@MrPushwood I play far more on the other site but I think this forum is not as toxic. Or at least what I have seen from it. Thats really what I want to do. Play human opponents and analyze my games. That way I can learn from my mistakes by seeing what the better play might have been and exploring that line to see where it leads. Some games play smoothly then I get someone that totally wrecks my position with 1 piece. Is it someone sandbagging? perhaps, or is it someone that just knows some trick plays? These are players with-in 50-100 points +/- my elo and I felt so outclassed. I want to learn from this and what to do so I might be better prepared for it in the future.
just practice tactics. it helps a lot at your stage. check the correct result if you failed. try to think before making a move.
it takes patience but patience will be rewarded in chess.
Hi
Is there Nibbler GUI for Windows 7 with exe extension to install? If there is, put the link.
What's Lc0?
Please put the link of the best normal chess engines as well as artificial intelligence engines.
If possible, put a tutorial on how to use this software, especially those parts that are important and you have already learned.
Thank you @kalafiorczyk
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