CHESS ASSISTANT vs ChessBase, NicBase?
CCHB
database similar to ChessBase and NicBase)? Does it have any
advantages/disadvantages over the other two? I know it can
import games from ChessBase and NicBase. How about ASCII?
The demo and the price look good. Any comments would be
appreciated.
Hugh.
Unknown
Russian IM, Vasily Gagarin, who has Chess Assistant and showed
me some of its features. Now I'm not too familiar with *any*
of the databases, but Gagarin claims it can search its database
for specific positions, pawn structures, material allocations,
etc. much more quickly than the others can. Indeed I made good
use of this and now have many practical examples of obscure
opening lines I play that I didn't know existed before. We also
looked up some neat things like games with several queens on the
board at once. I am aware that Vasya is not totally unbiased as
he is somehow involved in promoting and/or marketing the product
in the West (I don't know the details), but I was pretty
impressed with what I saw.
Jeff
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Andy Duplain
>>
> I was in Moscow this spring on a student exchange and met a
> Russian IM, Vasily Gagarin, who has Chess Assistant and showed
> me some of its features. Now I'm not too familiar with *any*
> of the databases, but Gagarin claims it can search its database
> for specific positions, pawn structures, material allocations,
> etc. much more quickly than the others can. Indeed I made good
> use of this and now have many practical examples of obscure
> opening lines I play that I didn't know existed before. We also
> looked up some neat things like games with several queens on the
> board at once. I am aware that Vasya is not totally unbiased as
> he is somehow involved in promoting and/or marketing the product
> in the West (I don't know the details), but I was pretty
> impressed with what I saw.
This Chess Assistant looks more appealing every time I hear about
it. I currently don't have ChessBase nor NICBase, and CA looks to
be the one I'll be going for (it's also 60 quid cheaper than ChessBase
4.0!). Does anyone know about data -- i.e. do they offer a service
like ChessBase ? Or are we to convert existing data for use with CA ?
--
Andy Duplain, BT Customer Systems, Brighton, UK. dup...@rtf.bt.co.uk
#define DISCLAIMER My views and opinions are my own, and not my company's
Yibing Fan
Gilles Jobin
Subject: CA vs CB or NIC
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First, please excuse my poor English. I bought CA... kept it one day
and I returned it to the dealer.
Here is why: I simply HATE the way we enter the games. Specificaly the
variations. In fact, you MUST use the keyboard to enter variations. If
you plan to use a chess database to enter opening article or long
games WITH variations, then it will be longer to do it with CA than
simply study with the 'real' chess board. This is the major problem,
IMHO, of CA.
Also, the chess board where is display the variations is in the bottom
right corner of the screen. This is stupid as we must look to a very
small board to follow the variations. CA do not use the full screen as
does CB.
The converters: It work slow but well between CB or NIC. BUT (and it
is another major problem) it do not convert partial games. EX. Suppose
you have enter a lot of studies with CB (with a lot of variations and
punctuations ) then the CA converter will not be able to read them. I
use CB to enter partial games when I study endgames. All this will be
lost if I transfer my data to CA.
For us, canadian french players, CA isn't able to put our accent aigu,
accent grave, etc. in the commentary. As I publish a small chess
magazine, this feature was essential to me.
It do not read ASCII games (in fact, only the basic version of NIC
does this).
The graphics are not very good. I do believe that in 1993, graphics
SHOULD be excellent. Only CB is good looking...
BUT CA has some good features: it is like CB (less my aversions quote
before) with kind of MOTIV and CBTREE (I have MOTIV but do not have CBTREE).
This last feature impressed me a lot even if it is quite slow to
process the 'tree'.
I think ChessBase is the best chess database on the market NOW. I
know, it cost more then the others but it is a lot better IF you
intend to enter yourself games, or use the database to study endgames,
and middlegames.
If you already have a lot of complete games and if you ONLY want to do
statistics on your data, then CA might be the right answer. I cannot
imagine myself studing chess with CA...
Best regards,
Gilles G. Jobin
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