Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I have been a longtime user of Chess Assistant and recently upgraded to CA 10. CA is a powerful chess database application with a lot of nice features.
I originally selected CA at the recommendation of an acquaintance, who preferred it over ChessBase. The price differential is appreciable, enough so that it is hard to overlook. I compared the "Light" versions of each and found CA to be more in line with what I wanted. ChessBase is a fine application, but CA fits my needs and my budget better.
With CA you get several databases. The largest, "HugeBase", has over 3.5 million games, and includes games all the way back to 1560. There is the "Guru" database as well and it has a much smaller, but higher quality, collection. Of course, there is also an openings preparation database which has all the variants necessary for learning any given opening. The actual game databases are searchable on a variety of criteria, including player name, game position, date, event name, material advantage, and a lot more, making finding specific games fairly easy. Also, there is an update function included that allows for automatic update of the application and databases, which keeps the databases current.
Creating new databases is easy. User databases have the same search functions available as the included databases, which helps in reviewing personal games. With the user databases you can merge bases, enter/delete/modify games, build trees, attach annotations and class identifiers and a lot more.
CA is not just a database application, though - it also includes a playing interface so that a player may play against a playing engine or may set up an engine tournament if desired. Most Winboard engines work under CA and there is solid support for UCI as well. There are several other interfaces supported too but I have not tried them. There are several included playing engines, chief among them being Rybka 3, currently the strongest playing engine available in the world with a playing strength far and away higher than any human has achieved. Crafty, Ruffian, and Dragon are also included.
Using the included engines, getting a thorough analysis of a game is an available option. Engine analysis is inserted directly into the game annotations. This is where I have found Rybka to be the most use (to me) as I certainly will not beat it in play but I appreciate its positional evaluations.
Don't want to play an engine? You don't have to - there is an ICC interface included that is very easy to start up and use. Finding an opponent, kibitzing a game or just browsing are all easy to navigate.
CA includes a nice feature set and has a lot of power. However, the interface is sometimes awkward. I have had some difficulty on occasion finding certain functions, buried in configuration boxes. Also, some of the default settings are not optimal, a good example being the board size which is (in my opinion) a little too small.
Chess Assistant 10 is a very powerful and very complete chess database management tool. With the included database collections, included playing engines, the update features and the interface to ICC, this is a very difficult package to ignore if you want or need a chess database application. It is a little awkward to use at times, but taking the time to learn what it can do is a very worthwhile undertaking. This is my chess database system of choice - it is appreciably less expensive than ChessBase and it includes everything I need to analyze, learn and play.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Chess Assistant 10 Starter Package with Rybka 3 Chess Software for PC
Rybka 3: The World's Strongest Chess Program* Current Computer Chess World Champion* Leads all independent computer chess rating lists* By far the most successful chess program in recent yearsThe Chess Opening Encyclopedia 2008 mode includes rich theoretical material on all the openings, more than 8 000 annotations from GM Kalinin and 500 000 expert evaluations to key opening positions. The detailed key system for any opening has an opportunity to edit. The Test Opening mode will allow testing your knowledge and skills in openings.Chess Assistant includes a user-friendly interface for playing at Internet Chess Club and playing zone ChessOK with free broadcasts.Chess Assistant 10 includes Rybka 3 engine for connection to Fritz, ChessBase, etc.Main Opening Book and Rybka II.ctg opening book includes.MAINBOOK is based on four sources:* Grandmaster evaluations (over 500,000 positions);* Evaluations from the CAP Data (over 36 million positions);* Statistics from the DirectTree (opening positions from more than 3 million games);* User corrections and add-ons.Besides there are following useful chess data: * Encyclopedia of players: 950 photos of the famous chess players in JPEG format, the list of the tournaments where the player participated, change of the ELO rating in the course of years. * MegaCAP (for Chess Assistant users) ' 36 000 000 computer evaluations.. Language versions: English, Spanish, German, French and Italian versions are available. System Requirements:128 Mb RAM, Hard Disk 1 Gb, Windows 2000/NT/XP, DVD-ROM.
