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!