Chessbase 12 Download Hit
Onofre Alamillo
I played a very interesting game today, and I entered it in ChessBase reader, along with some comments. I would love to save this game in a database (.cbh) or as a .pgn, but I don't know how. Can you please help me?
It is not possible to do this in chessbase reader. You can use Arena Chess (free) to do this then transfer this .pgn into Chessbase Reader. Reader allows me to use Chessbase products for training but to evaluate my own games I use Arena.
I would recommend ChessDB which claims to be the best free chess database program out there, although that was in 2007 ;-). It is quite powerful for a free program with the ability to download from TWIC from within the program. Also import from a player's ICC history. You can hook up to UCI interface games engines.
Of course you can save your games into a database but you cannot import Chessbase format. It has good search capabilities for a free program like player reports and search for games with exact position match.
While you cannot save new games with chessbase reader, you can edit and replace existing ones. So what I do is open a .pgn file (I created one and copy and rename it for each tournament) full of empty games and edit these, i.e. double click an empty game, enter the moves and comments, then right click the game in the list and select replace which lets you edit the metadata and writes the game to the .pgn file. Only the site tag seems to be unavailable, but if you edit it manually, cb reader will display it if the tournament name is short enough.
Take a look at chesstempo. You can use their online database free up to so many moves and then they want you to pay to search deeper. I used to use chesslab.com which was great for searching positions, but it uses a vulnerable version of flash -- if you can deal with that it is a nice resource.chess-db.com claims the biggest database (which is not necessarily good, do you want the kids under 12 tournaments?). The site is fast and has a lot of features.
I wouldn't recommend using the online version though, for a couple of reasons. As you have found, a few features seem to be missing. In addition, having wifi access is required if you want to look someone up (which can be inconvenient if you're at a tournament and need to prepare for an opponent quickly).
The ChessBase program is the way to go. I've been using it for around 10 years now and it's been great. It's straightforward to look any player up in any database. The program also supports the top chess engines (like Komodo, Stockfish), and allows you to save your games in databases.
A really good preparation tool that I use is 365chess. Although it is not better than ChessBase since it offers less features and games, it is online and free, the only requisite to access their big database is to register an account. You can filter games by player, but searching by player and position is a bit awkward, you may need to first go to his games and play out the moves to reach the position you want.
Chessbase by itself however is pretty useless. You need a decent reference database behind it eg; Mega Database 2020x. My Chessbase setup is the Mega Database 2021, Opening Reference Database 2021 and the Correspondance Database 2020 (which I reference the most). I addition to this I have a script to collect games of all titled players on Lichess and Chess.com that are 10 minute or above time controls.This gives me a comprehensive database for reference purposes. Storage is a bit of an issue that being said.
I utilise Chessbase to analyse every game I play, explore new opening ideas and I absolutely love it. That said, its an expensive set up. If you haven't got disposable income it effectively prices you out. I even have my own databases for Opening Repertoires , studies etc
I can't ethically suggest to someone they should invest the $500USD to get chessbase set up properly , but if you take chess seriously want to improve and support the developers of the tool , I would say it a very good tool.
There are free-alternatives (SCID as an example) however you need to build your own databases which can be quite hard. There is a website called which is quite good for this , which if you are patient or a adapt scripter you could collect all their archives and build your own database. Just an idea.
Chess Assistant = cheaper, more package combinations, superior analysis functions. Chessbase = Easier searches+saving+use+flexible membership, not buggy+superior support, uploads newest games on starter package, on-line latest games on all. As and ex-2100 chess player I find TONS within CA I relish but actually struggle and become frustrated with, whilst wishing for CB to reach those multiple+individual depths, if far more comfortable from a more reliable and quality+workable fact.
It seems that SCID has just had a major release (version 5.0) within the last day or two. Highlights in the update include a new database format supporting up to 4 billion games, a new engine window, and Chess960 support.
SCID is less polished than ChessBase, certainly. In my experience, it really falls behind in automated game analysis. ChessBase stands out in that arena, especially with its natural language annotations. SCID users may want to supplement it with another program for that kind of automated game analysis (sort of like how one combines Fritz and ChessBase into one workflow I suppose).
There are two things that I much prefer in SCID over ChessBase. The first is a small thing, but SCID's ECO classification just seems strictly superior to ChessBase's. It updates dynamically as you step through the opening moves of a game, catches all transpositions, and overall is much more informative with letting you know what variations you're looking at.
The second thing that I think SCID does better than ChessBase is database maintenance. Especially in finding and deleting twin games, ChessBase has been very lackluster for me in the past. While this may be less of a concern if the user only sticks to heavily curated databases like MegaBase, SCID's thorough twin deletion, spell checking, and of course ECO classification can otherwise be immensely helpful.
In the second paragraph, are you just referring to what is sometimes referred to as "annofritzing"? I'm not a fan of that practice, though of course different people have different opinions on that issue. But just to make sure I'm not misinterpreting your parenthetical at the end of that paragraph, you're not saying that there's any difficulty in using an engine inside SCID, are you?
Ah, sorry for the ambiguity. Indeed, you can set up and use engines for analysis in SCID. It has various amenities for it like hovering over the moves of the engine's output to show a diagram of that specific position, or importing its variations directly into the game notation.
By ChessBase's natural language annotations, I was referring to annofritzing, yes. But the lack of automated game analysis includes things like a one-button "quickly blunder check this entire game" option. Analyzing with engines in SCID is more so just infinite analysis on a position-by-position basis, rather than a whole game at a time.
To supplement SCID's database-centric capabilities, a user would have some other program like Arena for more engine-specific things if desired. This would include the automatic game blunder checking, but also things like setting up an engine vs. engine match or shootout to try to get a rough idea of the character of a position, for example. This is what I meant with the Fritz-ChessBase workflow comment.
While the main SCID branch (that just released an update) doesn't have these options, the Scid vs. PC fork does have more extensive engine features like blunder checking, annotation, or engine vs. engine matches. I'm not certain how often that fork is receiving updates if at all, but if not it's still in a decently stable and feature-complete state.
I've used both chessbase and SCID-vs-PC for years. I prefer SCID-vs-PC over the original SCID because there are a couple of interface differences. SCID-vs-PC has a unique feature I like that chessbase doesn't ... in SCID-vs-PC you can set your player name or names and when you open a game with your player name it automatically flips the board, if necessary, so that your player's color is on the bottom. I don't think the original SCID has that option.
The main reason I prefer SCID to chessbase is that I prefer to use the Linux Operating System rather than Windows and chessbase will only run in a virtualbox Windows session. Also, SCID-vs-PC only costs time to learn, there is no financial cost. I have built a nice database from TWIC and high-level pre-TWIC games going back to Morphy.
Chess newbie here, but LucasChess also has some of the same functions. Not sure how it compares to database specific tools (i.e. SCID or CB), but it is nice to have training tools and my personal games all in one local program.
I use HIARCS on macOS. It has a nice clean UI, can integrate any engine (that supports the standard plugin API). They can maintain databases in PGN format or in their own HCE format (which loads very very fast and is more compact than PGN). The UI is quite nice, I think; with rely nice display of the moves, comments, variations ... I prefer to read through a game record in HIARCS over any other choice (CB online, lichess, chess.com).
It can import CBV (and I think CBH), but only standard games ... it doesn't capture the moves for Chess960 (the CBV format is proprietary to CB with no public documentation, so has to be reverse engineered by any other product wishing to import CBV files. If transferring games from CB to HIARCS, I recommend exporting to a PGN database file and importing that to HIARCS; though if all the games are standard, then CBV should work as well.
The HCE database format allows "huge databases only limited by memory - 1GB per 8 million games". So it could handle the MegaDatabase's 110 million games if you have enough RAM (perhaps 14 GB free memory). My TWIC db, in HCE form, loads in about 1 second on a 3-yo mac laptop.
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