Okay. Questions were answered at http://www.bookup.com/whybuy.htm (and at http://www.bookup.com/20q.htm ) You didn't have the .htm on your whybuy-link.

Greetings,

Well, I've sorted out WinBoard so it can now see Crafty-20.14 (latest release) as well as GNUChess 5.07 (the most recent though old-ish release).

Interesting comparing them - Crafty seems to hit 12-ply pretty quickly whereas GNUChess takes a while arriving at that depth. Crafty definitely has the edge - it seems to reach 15-ply without any problem - I've only seen GNUChess reach 13 or 14 at most in simpler positions.

Now to download Chessbase Light and see if I can access the playable eBooks - or do I have to be a Member?

Kindest regards,

James

986:

Thanks for the info.  I'll give the new beta version a try.

Cheers,
Ostap

986 wrote on 06/29/06 at 18:35:17:


Roughly how new is the newest beta?  The last time I used Chesspositiontrainer was probably around September, 2005 and my impressions are based on the version which existed at that time.  If it's been significantly upgraded in the last 8-9 months I guess it might be worth giving it another try.

I agree 100% with Ostap's review of Chess Position Trainer.

Great potential, but buggy and unstable.

Chess Position Trainer is free and looks much better than Bookup.

http://www.chesspositiontrainer.com/cpt/index.aspx

OstapBender wrote on 06/28/06 at 17:23:29:


I find Bookup so useful that I use it even though I have CA.  This business about recognizing transpositions is really no small matter.  Quite a few times I've discovered that one branch of say, the Open Defense unexpectedly transposes into another -- and often without attracting the comment of theoreticians.  Also it's a very clean, intuitive interface.

One particularly nice feature is that if you put your evaluations in your terminal positions, Bookup will automatically provide the correct evaluation (assuming optimal play against your variations) for every position in the tree. 

It's worth noting too that you can also use Bookup as an endings or middle game trainer.  For a middlegame example, one of my students has entered all the positions from Michalchischin, Srokowski and Braslawski's books "Isolated Pawn" and "Hanging Pawns" into Bookup.  Oh, and recognizing transpositions is super-important if you're studying endings.

Having said that, my impression is that you can use CA or CB as an openings trainer if you want to.  I'm not too sure how to do that, since I've always had Bookup.  Others could perhaps enlighten us. 

You may want to read this: http://www.bookup.com/whybuy. ; (I perhaps should stress that I have no commercial interest whatever in Bookup!)

Bookup doesn't come cheap at roughtly $120, so perhaps its a question of how much someone wants to have a nifty way of spreading out and studying his trees of variations.

Quote:


Shredder works fine with Scid, at least on Linux. It needs polyglot, but is fairly straight-forward to set up.