Bookup/Zarkov---first impressions

[James H. Coombs]

I just purchased Bookup and Zarkov. I didn't intend to give an
evaluation here, but that is what I wrote. The short version: I have
complaints, I like them, I am going to use them. So here are first
impressions....

I can say that the two desparately need the help of a professional
user-interface designer. Of course, the same is true of Chessbase.
Bookup, for example, provides no menus, no help anywhere. Zarkov is
certainly better, but the main menu is invoked by F1 and other menus by
Alt-A, Alt-F, etc. And the two together? Well, F9 is Next in Bookup
and Back in Zarkov. So, no consistency, either internal or external.
Also, it's great that Bookup and Zarkov work together, but why do we
have to exit one to use the other? I believe they were written by
different people, are different products, may even be in different
languages; and they are hampered by MS-DOS. But, as we move into more
sophisticated OSs, we should be able to have a genuine ZarkBook.
(Haven't I heard this before?)

So much for the complaints, the bottom line? I believe that I will use
them. I am already using Bookup for a correspondence game. It's great
to enter the variations and have them ready without having to hunt to
find my records. Unfortunately, the comment field editor is the most
primitive editor I have ever seen: no delete, no insert, no
word-wrap---just type on top of whatever is or isn't there.

As for Zarkov. I am using it mostly for analysis right now. In one
game, I find it very helpful to find that Zarkov considers things about
equal where I thought I had a significant advantage. During the game,
I was getting a little huffy because Chess Justice was not winning out
(I finally blundered).

After a tournament, I think I can now put in a game and let Zarkov
crunch out evaluations of 2 or 3 possible moves for each position. I
can then play through the game while consulting the analysis. This is
going to be much better than working with my Fidelity 2000. Here is
the analysis of the beginning of one game:

Move Score Suggested Line

1. e4 26 0 BOOK
1. c6 2 0 BOOK
2. Nf3 -7 0 BOOK
2. d5 16 0 BOOK
3. d3 -18 0 BOOK
3. dxe4 -2 3 d5e4 d3e4 d8d1 e1d1
3. dxe4 23 3 g8f6 e4e5 f6g4

The actual game was: 1. e4 c6, 2. Nf3 d5, etc. You can readily see
that on move 3, Zarkov gives -2 (=2 for Black) if Black plays dxe4 but
23 (=23 for White) if Black plays Nf6. (100 = 1 pawn). The column of
0s and 3s gives the number of ply completed in the analysis. (I just
grabbed this example quickly. I plan to allow 3 minutes per move,
which will give about 6 ply on my XT with Turbo and about 8 ply on my
25 MHz 80486.)

Unfortunately, Zarkov does not seem to be able to read this file and
play it directly. I have 2.6 and will have to call to find out how to
use the 'chop' command, which may make such reading possible. In any
case, Zarkov is going to provide only part of the analysis, and I will
have my own ideas to try out interactively.

For really quick analysis, however, I think Zarkov will do most of the
work:

1. Play the game!

2. Go home, start Zarkov, input your moves (mouse or keyboard).

3. Ask Zarkov to analyze the game, say, 180 seconds for each of
3 candidate moves (that's about 9 minutes for each ply in the
game, so the game should be short, or you cut back to 2
candidates, etc.).

4. Go eat dinner, etc.

5. Get the analysis from Zarkov. Scan the "Suggested Line"
column for moves that might have been significantly better.
Find the major transitions in scoring and ensure that you
know what was going on.

6. More time? Try ideas out against Z.

I think this is pretty exciting. Perhaps other chess programs have
similar abilities. If so, it would be interesting to see specifics
from people who use them.

I am less excited about Bookup at the moment, although it is useful for
the correspondence game (which is what got me to buy the two in the
first place). Also, I do study openings, but I have not had time to
find out just how useful Bookup will be to me for openings. I suspect
that I will input the oddities that come up from time to time so that I
can find them readily instead of searching through all of my books to
find just a couple of pages here and there. And it can provide a quick
way to review openings before tournaments.

In any case, Bookup is not for your tournament games. It took 500 Kb
for just a dozen games. Use Bookup only for heavy analysis of closely
related positions: openings, correspondence games, etc. I say this
because I bought Bookup to store my games and got Zarkov only on a
whim, but it should have been the other way around. Zarkov can save
games, along with your comments, and can even generate those ASCII
board diagrams where you want them (but does not save variations that
you try out).

--Jim