Convekta Is Working On A New Chess GUI

If Fritz, Shredder, and Arena don't quite work for you...Convekta is hard at work on a new chess GUI. The planned features look good; among other things, they're aiming for best-of-breed in annotation options.

Even better, they seem to be putting a lot of effort into listening to users, and incorporating their suggestions when they can.

If you'd like to follow the development, and offer your opinion on features, take a look at http://rybkaforum.net. There's a Rybka GUI discussion board that will only appear if you register and log in. Once you've logged in, a new forum should appear: Rybka GUI / Features & Functionality.

They haven't said so directly, but I think that their distribution and marketing of the Rybka chess engine is the reason for the effort. They are selling what is almost certainly the strongest chess engine, but they don't have a complete package; at the moment, they're bundling Rybka with their Chess Openings package for playing and analysis, leading to endless confusion.

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I debated posting a link to a screenshot, but decided against it -- they haven't worked on the graphics yet. They plan to focus on board and piece graphics soon, using vector graphics to draw the pieces. There are screenshots posted in the forum linked above.

Don't Believe Everything You Read

Black to Move

r1bq1rk1/pppn1pp1/8/3pP1NQ/1b1P4/8/PP3PPP/R1B2RK1 b - - 0 13

The position above is from Game 19 of Euwe and Meiden's Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur. White, the master, sacrificed his bishop on h7; he just moved Qh5. Black to move; what would you do?

The amateur chose Re8 in the game, which led to a forced mate in 5; Euwe and Meiden comment that Re8 is "the only move"; Fritz begs to differ.

Answer:
[
It turns out that Nf6 saves the game for Black, though Fritz still rates White better by a pawn or so. I can see how this was missed; sacrifice the Knight to clear the way for the bishop, sort of a reloader...
]

It was funny how I ran across this. I took the white pieces against Fritz after the bishop sacrifice, and things didn't work out as well as they did in the book.

It just goes to show this game isn't easy if you're not Fritz.

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That said, I like this book; it's another good collection of heavily annotated games for the beginner. It differs from Logical Chess: Move by Move in that the games are between an anonymous master and an anonymous amateur player, along the lines of Silman's Amateurs Mind -- the idea being that amateurs will learn how to take advantage of opportunities in their own games. Early games feature the master against beginners making obvious mistakes; later games have the master exploiting more subtle errors by strong amateurs.

I enjoy the style of annotation -- authoritative and calm -- and as a bonus, one game features the master playing the Allgaier Gambit!

Progress of a sort

Work and family have kept me busy recently, so I haven't been posting much; I didn't have much to say, in any case.

I've still made some time each day to work on tactics. I posted a month ago that I'd finally settled on CT-Art 3.0 as my next problem set. Well, I'm proud to announce that I've just finished...Tactics Module 01 in PCT. That's me: decisive. I noticed that I've memorized a few incorrect patterns, repeating the same mistake each time I see the problem, so I'm taking some time to review the module in an attempt to unlearn those patterns. It seems that unlearning a bad pattern is more difficult than learning the correct pattern in the first place -- I'll need to watch out for this in the future.

Meanwhile, I just hit 30,000 problems at CTS. My rating has stayed in a narrow band, but my success rate has risen to 75.5%. Onward and upward!

A First Book of Morphy

Hat tip to Blue Devil Knight for mentioning A First Book of Morphy by Frisco Del Rosario in his chessplanner. I just finished the book, and enjoyed it very much.

Heisman and others recommend that beginners start with open games; in the same vein, they recommend that study of master games begins with Morphy and others from the period of swashbuckling chess on the open board. I've investigated other Morphy books, but the annotations weren't as detailed as I'd like, or were geared towards more experienced players.

As the author notes in the introduction,

The best way to practice chess, according to Purdy, is to play through a master's games while covering the master's moves and guessing at them in turn. That exercise is most useful when the master's moves are simple and straightforward and based on principle, for when the student guesses incorrectly, he might more easily deduce the master's intent. Morphy's games are excellent for this kind of study.

I've already gone through Logical Chess: Move by Move. I liked it, but most of the games weren't the openings I play; many Queen's Gambit Declined, few Giuoco Pianos. Compare that to A First Book of Morphy: 14 Evans Gambits, 16 (!) Kings Gambits, 6 Two Knights Defense...and a single, lonely Queen's Gambit Declined. The games and annotations covered the simple themes I'm working with now: active play, coordinating pieces, developing with threats, seizing and keeping the initiative; when threatened, first look to see if you have a bigger threat.

To be clear, by design this book is aimed squarely at the beginner. The games are heavily annotated. Simple traps are pointed out clearly. At my level, I consider this a feature, not a bug.

The prose is entertaining; for example,

Plans must be flexible. It might have been your plan to read to the end of this section, or to the end of the page before getting a drink, but when your cat starts knocking cans off the top of the refrigerator, you might have to change your mind. Opponents and cats are like that -- they have their own ideas, and you often have to deal with theirs first.

The book is built around the framework of Reuben Fine's 30 chess principles from Chess the Easy Way: 10 opening principles, 10 middlegame principles, and 10 endgame principles. (You can find the list of principles in the First Book of Morphy link above; look at the table of contents.) At first, I was wondering if the author would have difficulty finding Morphy games for each of the 30 principles, but it wasn't a problem; each of the 30 principles has one or more well-chosen games by Morphy to illustrate the point. Note that the full games are always presented, not just the part of the game that relates to the principle under discussion.

Del Rosario also references Purdy's distillation of the 30 principles into two: use inactive force, and examine moves that smite.

The principles are useful enough, though only a couple of the ideas felt new to me (e.g. it is worth a pawn to get a rook on the seventh rank if there are 4 or more enemy pawns.) In the end, the value to me was the heavily annotated games, illustrating active play on an open board.

For an example of the annotation style, view the excerpt at the amazon link above.

Still here

I'm progressing slowly through my CT-Art Level 20 circles.

One reason I'm progressing slowly is all the time I'm spending on CTS. I'm approaching 25,000 problems tried. I'm trying to get more out of my CTS time by doing the problems in small blocks, and then using the session page to go back through the problems.

I'm also trying to raise my success percentage; it's slow going when you have 20,000 tries under your belt, but so far I've managed to raise it from 72.3% to 74.6%. I could have followed the lead of others and created a "SlowAbend" user, but I'm too stubborn.

I sometimes suspect that the speed and instant gratification of CTS contribute to my analytical laziness; when I'm spending time on CTS, I find it harder to work on CT-Art and really nail down all of the variations. On the other hand, I feel that the CTS experience, including the time pressure, trains one part of tactics very well: the ability to quickly scan a position for checks, captures, undefended pieces, etc. In the end, I've decided that CTS and CT-Art complement each other, quick vision and careful analysis. If only I had both, rather than neither.

PCT 2007 Update (Updated)

Some additional information:

• Version 3.01 is available for download from the site; however, the "Search for Updates" menu choice doesn't update the software, as of this writing. Downloading 3.01 from www.personalchesstrainer.com and installing worked fine -- I installed over the 3.00 installation, and my history and preferences were saved (though a backup never hurts!) I didn't need to re-activate.
  
  There's no changelog, but the one change I've noticed (and appreciated): the playing board, which was slightly too small on my 1280x1024 monitor, is now much larger at that resolution.


• The activations are limited to 2 computers (the license agreement also specifies 2 computers.) I tried to activate the software on a 3rd computer (desktop, laptop, work!) and activation failed.


• I've been unable to get a response using the Support form on the website. I sent the same question twice, two weeks apart, but did not receive an answer. Though I checked my spam folder, it's possible I missed the reply; I'll try again. Has anyone used the support form and received an answer? Maybe I'll try using the contact form, instead.

By the way, the support question I asked was "I've already activated the software on 2 computers; I wish to deactivate the software on one of the computers, and activate it on a new computer: how do I do this?" I'll let you know if I get a response -- I'll have to go through this all over again when I upgrade my computer. Thank you, Microsoft, for putting the idea of activation in these developers' heads.

Update: Instead of using the support form on the website, I emailed support@personalchesstrainer.com directly. I received a reply almost immediately: to deactivate a computer, go to Help/Check Code; email the code to support; they'll email back, authorizing you to install the software on a new computer.

Personal Chess Trainer website

Don't Panic

Two lessons that I thought I knew, but didn't:
1. When an opponent makes an unexpected move, don't panic
2. Analyze until quiescence

In the positions below, I'm Black. In the first diagram, it's White to move. I'm in a little time trouble, but I think the game is basically even. I expect White to move b5, but he surprises me with Nxd5.

White to Move

r3r1k1/pp4pp/2p2pb1/3p4/1PnP2P1/2N1P3/P4PBP/R4RK1 w - - 0 22

After Nxd5

r3r1k1/pp4pp/2p2pb1/3N4/1PnP2P1/4P3/P4PBP/R4RK1 b - - 0 22

I've been working on my thought process, but the surprise made it go to pieces. My post-surprise thought process went like this:
Step 1. Panic
Step 2. "I always miss moves like that -- I always edit out captures of protected pawns"
Step 3. "If I take with the pawn, he takes with the bishop, forking my king and knight -- leaving him a couple of pawns up. Plus he's threatening to fork my rooks."

I didn't see any counter-attack, so I moved a rook, played on a pawn down, and eventually lost the endgame. Of course, if I'd calmly looked until the position was quiet, I'd have seen that I should take the knight with the pawn; if he recaptures with the bishop, blocking the check with my bishop also protects the knight, leaving me ahead a piece for two pawns.

You know, I didn't feel that bad after this loss, because it was such a good lesson for me. That's why it was important for me to start playing; you don't really learn until you learn it in a game. Actually, you don't really learn until you learn it in a loss.