Chess Teacher Lessons » General

ChessX 0.6

Chess Teacher — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 09:09:52 +0000

A couple of months ago and two years after the previous version ChessX has released a new version. This is version 0.6, which can be downloaded for Windows and Mac on the download section of the ChessX site.
I decided to try this version and I started by saving the games of the IJ105 database as a PGN file, which is currently the format that is needed for ChessX, but a Native Database Format is planned for the next release. I also made a PGN file that contained the first 1000 games of this Database.

As you can see the PGN file uses a lot of memory when compared to the SCID or ChessDB database files.

I was unable to use the large database. It started to load the games, but after waiting for more than an hour it was still busy loading.
Loading the file with the first 1000 games went rather smooth and I like the way it looks and how you can position everyting as you wish.

If you only need something like this for your own games (with a rather small database) than this may be a very interesting multi platform alternative, but for large databases it will probably not be usable. However, the next release promises to add a Native Database Format, which may solve these problems.

Beautiful chess (2)

Chess Teacher — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:52:43 +0000

As a kind of follow-up on the previous post I’ll have to show you this picture from Cindy Seigle. This is one of the many beautiful chess sets set up in the atrium at the West Baden Springs Hotel in Orange County, Indiana.

Chess set at the West Baden Springs Hotel by cindy47452

Beautiful chess

Chess Teacher — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:30:08 +0000

Chess is often played with beautiful pieces. This is one of the reasons to start playing chess. We like the pieces and we like the game. The picture below illustrates some of this beauty.

Chess by frankblacknoir

Chess collage

Chess Teacher — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:40:21 +0000

Tag Galaxy is a 2008 diploma thesis project by Steven Wood that enables you to browse through the galaxy of pictures by entering tags. After entering a tag related tags are shown visualized by other planets in an orbit around the “world” of selected tags.
You’ll have to see it for yourself.

The picture above is the resulting chess+game+king+board world.

Scid, ChessDB and ChessX

Chess Teacher — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 14:34:58 +0000

In some of my previous posts I have mentioned the ChessDB chess database program, but you may also want to use one of the other free available chess databases.
Scid (Shane’s Chess Information Database) was written by Shane Hudson. He started Scid in 1999, but the development stopped in 2004.
December 2006 the development of Scid continued with the publication of the first release of ChessDB. This project was started by Dr. David Kirkby.
Pascal Georges joined him, but the cooperation went very wrong and he started another continuation of Scid. The two different points of view can be found here and here.

In addition ChessX is another free chess database under development. Initially ChessX also has started as a continuation of Scid, but after some initial development, it was decided to break away from the Tcl/Tk code and start to program in Qt and C++ in order to get the program faster.

Another free chess database is Jose, but you can also use the free versions of some of the commercial chess databses. Chess Assistant Light is the free version of Convekta’s Chess Assistant and ChessBase Light 2007 is the free version of ChessBase. Chess Assistant Light is limited to 15,000 games and the games are limited to 255 moves. ChessBase Light is limited to 32,000 games per database.

You just have to look and decide for yourself which (free) Chess database will be the best.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

Chess Teacher — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:52:08 +0000

I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

This year a lot of chess lessons have been added to this site. You can get a quick overview by looking at the static page Chess Lessons and from each lesson it is possible to navigate to the next or previous lesson (thanks to the In Series plugin).

For next year I hope that I am also able to add about one chess lesson a week.

Online Nalimov Endgame Tablebases

Chess Teacher — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 13:29:34 +0000

If you are looking for a place to study some difficult endgames the following may be of interest to you.

Using the applet on the Knowledge4IT site all of the currently published Nalimov Tablebases can be queried online (incl. 6-men databases). On this Web Query page you are able to check some of these sometimes very difficult endgames.

By checking this tablebases we see that the given position, which arose after 66 moves in the game between Stellan Brynell (2501) and Mihail Krasenkow (2651) in the 4th round of the Corus Chess Tournament 2007 (C), turns out to be a mate in 41 problem.

The specific endgame is rather remarkable because in contradiction to the endgame without the pawn Black’s additional pawn will be the reason that White is able to win the game.

Both players turned out to be rather unfamiliar with this kind of endplay and the game ended in a draw. White played 67.Ne4! after which Black continued with 67…Kg7?! and now we have a mate in 25 problem. Instead of the appropriate move 68.Nd6, White played 68.Kf5?! after which 41 moves are needed again.