— Enclyclopedia of Middlegame V (on CD) course is aimed at teaching a student much of the middlegame methods and intricacies through a theoretical section which includes over 500 games/lectures.

— Total Chess Ending (on CD) course includes over 700 games/lectures, each of them illustrating theoretical and practical endgame methods.

The 3rd Kings tournament takes place in Medias, Romania, Monday, June 14, 2010 - Friday, June 25, 2010.
Participants: Magnus Carlsen, Wang Yue, Boris Gelfand, Teimour Radjabov, Ruslan Ponomariov and Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu.

Games start at 13:30 UTC. Final round starts at 11:30 UTC
ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of the tournament with Rybka Aquarium commentary.

Games: Round 1 [ PGN], Round 2 [ PGN]

Carlsen - Ponomariov 1/2 brGelfand - Wang Yue 1-0 brNisipeanu - Radjabov 1-0 brRadjabov - Carlsen 1/2 brGelfand - Nisipeanu 1/2 brWang Yue - Ponomariov 1/2 Carlsen (2813) (NOR) brWang Yue (2752) (CHI) brGelfand (2741) (ISR) brRadjabov (2740) (AZE) brPonomariov (2737) (UKR) brNisipeanu (2672) (ROM)

— How to Win Miniatures in Chess to learn how to mate in 2, 3 and 4 moves in opening
— Elementary Chess Combinations to learn simple tactical methods
— Chess Combinations for Club Players to learn advanced tactical methods

— Chess: Simple Defense to learn how to defend your pieces from capturing
— Chess: Easy Ways of Taking Pawns and Pieces to learn how to capture the pieces
— Attack on the King I to learn how to attack the king in middlegame and mate in 2
— Attack on the King II to learn how to attack the king in middlegame and mate in 3 & 4

All courses cost €25.60 / $32.

The 11th annual Poikovsky Tournament will be held in from June 2nd to 13th.

Participants: Karjakin, Jakovenko, Jobava, Vitugov, Motylev, Rublevsky, Onischuk, Naiditsch, Ryasantsev, Bologan, Sutovsky, Sokolov.

ChessOK is going to publish all games of the tournament with Rybka 4 analysis (post game).

Games: Round 1 [ PGN]

Rublevsky - Ryasantsev 0-1 brOnischuk - Motylev 1/2 brBologan - Sokolov 1-0 brNaiditsch - Vitugov 1/2 brJobava - Karjakin 1/2 brSutovsky - Jakovenko 1/2 Karjakin (2739) (RUS) brJakovenko (2725) (RUS) brJobava (2715) (GEO), brVitugov (2707) (RUS) brMotylev (2704) (RUS) brRublevsky (2704) (RUS) brOnischuk (2699) (USA) brNaiditsch (2686) (DEU) brRyasantsev (2674) (RUS) brBologan (2668) (MOL) brSutovsky (2661) (ISR) brSokolov (2654) (BIH)

Starting from May 26th, Rybka 4 UCI and Deep Rybka 4 UCI (standalone Rybka 4, without interface) download versions will be available for order. The CD versions will be available from May 28th.

Please note, that (Deep) Rybka 4 Aquarium or Chess Assistant 11 already include Rybka 4 UCI / Deep Rybka 4 UCI without any additional payments along with a bonus program of Openings Encyclopedia 2010. There’s also a 30% discount package of Rybka 4 Aquarium + Chess Assistant available for order.

Rybka 4 UCI / Deep Rybka 4 UCI can be used in all modern chess programs such as Aquarium, Chess Assistant, Fritz, Shredder, Chessbase, Arena etc.

Due to the notable delay in Mr. Vasik Rajlich’s Rybka 4 development plan, we inform you that expected release dates for (Deep) Rybka 4 Aquarium, Rybka 4 Aquarium Opening Book and Chess Assistant 11 are moved to May, 26th for download versions and May, 28th for DVD versions.

We deeply apologize for the caused inconvenience.

More info about (Deep) Rybka 4 Aquarium, Rybka 4 Aquarium Opening Book and Chess Assistant 11.

The final FIDE Grand Prix is held in in Astrakhan from May 9th to 25th.

Players: Vladimir Akopian (Armenia) Evgeny Alekseev (Russia) Pavel Eljanov (Ukraine) Vugar Gashimov (Azerbaijan) Boris Gelfand (Israel) Ernesto Inarkiev (Russia) Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine) Dmitry Jakovenko (Russia) Peter Leko (Hungary) Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (Azerbaijan) Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukraine) Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan) Peter Svidler (Russia) Wang Yue (China).

The top two in the Grand Prix series standings qualify for the next FIDE Candidates cycle 2010-11.

Games: Round 1 [ PGN], Round 2 [ PGN]

Gashimov Vugar - Ivanchuk Vassily 1-0 brEljanov Pavel - Svidler Peter 1/2 brAkopian Vladimir - Gelfand Boris 1/2 brMamedyarov Shakhriyar - Jakovenko Dmitry 1/2 brWang Yue - Leko Peter 1/2 brAlekseev Evgeny - Radjabov Teimour 1/2 brInarkiev Ernesto - Ponomariov Ruslan 1/2 brJakovenko Dmitry - Gashimov Vugar 1/2 brRadjabov Teimour - Inarkiev Ernesto 1/2 brSvidler Peter - Ponomariov Ruslan 0-1 brLeko Peter - Alekseev Evgeny 1-0 brGelfand Boris - Mamedyarov Shakhriyar 1-0 brEljanov Pavel - Akopian Vladimir 1-0 brIvanchuk Vassily - Wang Yue 1/2 br Gashimov Vugar (2734) (AZE) brEljanov Pavel (2751) (UKR) brAkopian Vladimir (2694) (ARM) brMamedyarov Shakhriyar (2763) (AZE) brWang Yue (2752) (CHN) brAlekseev Evgeny (2700) (RUS) brInarkiev Ernesto (2669) (RUS) brPonomariov Ruslan (2733) (UKR) brRadjabov Teimour (2740) (AZE) brLeko Peter (2735) (HUN) brJakovenko Dmitry (2725) (RUS) brGelfand Boris (2741) (ISR) brSvidler Peter (2735) (RUS) brIvanchuk Vassily (2741) (UKR)

ChessOK presents 7 new chess courses dedicated to improve various skills:
— Elementary Chess Combinations to learn simple tactical methods
— Chess Combinations for Club Players to learn advanced tactical methods
— How to Win Miniatures in Chess to learn how to mate in 2, 3 and 4 moves in opening
— Attack on the King I to learn how to attack the king in middlegame and mate in 2
— Attack on the King II to learn how to attack the king in middlegame and mate in 3 & 4
— Chess: Easy Ways of Taking Pawns and Pieces to learn how to capture the pieces
— Chess: Simple Defense to learn how to defend your pieces from capturing

All courses cost €20 / $25. All courses are for download. The CD version will be available in a few days.

Oenings Encyclopedia 2010 has been recently released ans is available at our online shop. It includes theoretical material on every opening, a user-friendly and detailed classification of variations, a quick search option and an option for analyzing games and positions.

Openings material is based upon 500,000 of expert evaluations, 8,000 annotations to key moves , 40 million of evaluations by Rybka engine, and database of 4,200,000 games as of April 1, 2010.

For download — €25.60 / $32
On DVD — €31.96 / $39.95

The match between World Champion Vishwanatan Anand (India) and challenger, former World Champion, Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria) for World Champion title is going to be held in Sofia from 21st April to 12th May.

The total prize fund is €2,000,000 — €1,200,000 for winner and € 800,000 for the runner-up.

Format: 12 games with classical time control. If total score is tied after 12 games (6-6), 4 rapid games are played. If these are also tied, 2 blitz games are played. If these are also tied, up to 5 similar blitz series are held. If there is still no winner, the ‘armageddon’ blitz is held.

Game days: 23th, 24th, 26th, 27th, 29th, 30th of April, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 8th, 10th of May and 12th of May for tie-breaks. All games start at 12.00 UTC.

ChessOK is going to broadcast live with Rybka Aquarium commentary.

We are glad to inform you, that Rybka 4 Aquarium and Deep Rybka 4 Aquarium with new Rybka 4 engine are available for preorder in our shop. Both items are planned to be released in the first part of May. The actual release date is yet to be determined, please follow our announcements on this page.

— Rybka 4 Aquarium Download - €47.20 / $59.00 | DVD - €49.99 / $62.49
— Deep Rybka 4 Aquarium Download - €95.20 / $119.00 | DVD - €99.92 / $124.90
^{Click on the links to view descriptions and additional information}

With every Deep Rybka 4 Aquarium / Rybka 4 Aquairum package you will also get a bonus of Openings Encylopedia 2010, which includes rich theoretical material on all the openings, more than 8000 annotations from GM Kalinin and 500 000 expert evaluations to key opening positions as well as powerful search system.

If you’re Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010 / Rybka 4 Aquairum 2010 customer you will also get a free Opening Lab training course.

Both packages of course include the new powerful Rybka 4 engine. Read more what’s new in the upcoming Rybka 4 Aquarium.

Expect announcement on preorders of Rybka 4 Opening Book and Chess Assistant 11 soon.

A new version of Aquarium 2010 (version 4.0.3) will soon be released and it’s free for current users. The new version has several new features, some of which are described below. First a quick overview, followed by more detailed description of each feature:

• A new correspondence chess module and improved support for correspondence players.
• Hide selected names in the Navigation Pane.
• Highlight the moves in the notation that lead to the current position.
• Automatically mark moves that have been analyzed deeply with infinite analysis.
• See which games are being analyzed with infinite analysis.
• Keyboard shortcut to add infinite analysis evaluation and time to the notation.
• Configurable fields in database list (new fields: Date and ECO).
• Cancel option in IDeA startup dialog box.
• Three new options when stopping IDeA.
• Two new IDeA presentation options.
• “Active” button to activate/deactivate projects in IDeA Control Center.
• “View Project” button in IDeA Control Center.
• IDeA session statistics in IDeA Control Center.
• Automatic creation/correction of tree configurations.
• QAT Engine configuration button in IDeA view.
• A new Root Node button in IDeA Project View ribbon.
• Improved project statistics.
• 2D-Eval chart showing IDeA node distribution by score.
• MM-Delta chart, comparing infinite analysis evaluations with IDeA scores.
• Branching chart, showing number of candidate moves for variations.
• A link to analysis settings has been added to the IDeA Project Status window.
• A single-click link to enable/disable root nodes added to Project Status window.
• Improved Root Node List dialog box.
• Four new lists for storing positions along with comments.
• Changed display of IDeA analysis queue to facilitate handling of large number of positions.
• A feature that makes accurate count of nodes in an IDeA tree.
• Reset IDeA marks in notation.

Besides the new correspondence chess module, most new features can be characterized as usability improvements.

Correspondence Chess

The new Aquarium correspondence chess module is a major new feature that gives you a unified method of playing your correspondence games on Xfcc compliant servers.

Starting Aquarium’s correspondence play module

You get a quick overview of all your games in a single list, even if you have games in progress on different servers.

The new Aquarium correspondence play module

When you make your moves, many of the possible sources of error are eliminated. Games can be saved directly in an Aquarium database where you can check opening statistics, look up the position in endgame tablebases or use Aquarium’s analysis tools. No matter how extensive your notes and analysis are, Aquarium automatically ensures that only the move you make is transferred to your opponent and your notes and analysis will stay private.

For an overview of this new module, see Correspondence Chess with Aquarium 2010.

Hidden Names in Navigation Pane

Another feature that is of interest to correspondence players is the new “Hidden Names” option. It specifies names of players that should be hidden in the Navigation pane (sidebar) list. Click the Aquarium button, select “Options” and then “Display Options” from the menu. Clicking the “Hidden Names” button allows you to enter names that won’t be displayed in the Navigation pane.

Hide names in Navigation pane

In this example, when a game involving “Karpov, Anatoly” is open, only his opponent’s name will be displayed in the Navigation pane. If Karpov had white against Kasparov, then “- Kasparov, G” would be displayed so you can easily see the opponent’s name.

If you are a correspondence player, you might want to take advantage of this feature and hide your own name. When you are working with a database of your own games, you can quickly see your opponents’ names, as they won’t get cut off in the Navigation pane, even when you have the white pieces.

How Did I Get Here?

When examining a heavily annotated game, have you ever got lost in the notation? Unsure about the path you followed to reach the current position? Press the “L” key and the path will be highlighted as shown in the next image.

The path to the current position is highlighted

If you press “L” again, the highlight effect will be removed. If you move to a position outside the current path, press “L” to highlight the new path.

This new feature works in the Sandbox, database game view, and IDeA Project View.

Infinite Analysis

Now you can highlight moves in the notation that you have analyzed with infinite analysis. This feature gives you a quick overview of the moves you have analyzed and helps you spot positions that may need more attention.

Highlight analyzed moves

Click the dialog box launcher (tool button) in the Infinite Analysis group (highlighted in the image above). “Additional Infinite Analysis Options” will be displayed. Here you can enter the number of seconds required to mark a move as analyzed. In this example a move will be marked after 10 seconds of infinite analysis. Here is an example showing several moves marked as analyzed.

Analyzed moves highlighted in notation

Moves that have been analyzed for more than 10 seconds are highlighted with “Engine analysis” style, which in this case has been defined to display the move in pink color. You can modify the style by pressing Shift+S. For more information about styles and move classes, see Aquarium’s Hidden Treasures, Part One.

Even those who use IDeA as their main analysis tool, like to browse analysis trees looking for positions where they suspect the evaluation may not be correct. In that case, they can run infinite analysis to verify the IDeA results. Since the “Engine analysis” style is saved with the game, you can quickly see which positions you have analyzed when you open the game at a later time.

This is another feature that will be useful for correspondence players who need to keep track of their analysis in several ongoing games. This is a good opportunity to remind users that Aquarium stores all your infinite analysis, as long as it is sufficiently deep.

Stored infinite analysis

If you hover with the mouse pointer over the move and evaluation shown in the status bar, a window will pop up showing the results of your previous analysis of the current position as the screenshot above illustrates.

Now that multi-core computers have become common, and some players even have access to two or more computers, you may want to run infinite analysis on more than one game at the same time. You can always see which games are being analyzed by the green rectangle next to the games in the Navigation pane as shown below.

Green rectangles indicate analysis

Here we see three games being analyzed at the same time with infinite analysis. The green rectangles help you to quickly identify which games are being analyzed.

One more infinite analysis feature worth mentioning is the new Ctrl+E keyboard shortcut. It copies the current evaluation from the analysis window and inserts it as a “Long After” comment in the notation along with the analysis time.

Configurable Fields in Database List

Aquarium is slowly adding improved database features. In the new version, you can configure which fields are displayed in the database list.

Configurable columns

When you want to add or remove columns, right-click over the game list to display the menu shown above and click “Select columns.” Two new fields are available for the database list: Date and ECO code.

The IDeA Control Center

IDeA sees many improvements in the new Aquarium 2010 version. Unlike the initial Aquarium 2010, which revolutionized the analysis features, the new version focuses on usability improvements and giving the user more information about the status of the analysis.

Since there are so many changes, I break them into sections based their location. I start with the new buttons in the Ribbon and changes to how existing buttons work.

Starting IDeA

When you click “Start IDeA” in the IDeA Control Center and there is more than one active project, a list of the projects is displayed. If these are actually the projects that you want to analyze, just click OK.

IDeA informs about active projects

Now there is a Cancel button in case these are not the projects you want to analyze. After canceling, you can activate the projects you want to analyze and deactivate others before starting IDeA again.

Stopping IDeA

When stopping IDeA you get three new options, instructing IDeA to perform certain tasks before shutting down.

Actions to perform before stopping

If you don’t select any of these options, IDeA will stop immediately, without completing the analysis of current tasks, as it did in the previous version.

Wait for current IDeA tasks to finish stops IDeA after completing the tasks that are currently being analyzed.

Minimax after finish will minimax IDeA trees for all active projects before stopping.

Make accurate position count in subtrees (long) is a new feature that makes an accurate count of positions reachable from every node in the tree. Note that this is a very time consuming operation and you should not use it at all for trees with more than 30,000 positions. The method used for counting is more advanced and accurate, but also different from the method normally used by IDeA itself. One of the differences is that IDeA counts each node in the tree once, but the new option may count the same position many times if it can be reached via different paths. Also, it is not affected by move colors. Therefore, the numbers you see will often be very different from those normally shown by IDeA.

IDeA Presentation Options

Clicking the tool button in the IDeA group gives you two new options.

IDeA presentation options

Automatically show the selected task in the notation refers to what happens when you click a task in the task queue, which is displayed in the Stage Status window in project view. If you select this option, the position corresponding to the task, and the line leading up to the position, will be automatically displayed in the notation.

Display a warning when there are many active projects decides if the dialog box described above is displayed when you start IDeA with more than one active project.

Activate/Deactivate Project

The “Active” button is now available in the IDeA Control Center. This means that you can select a project in the project list and press “Active” to toggle the active state of the project.

In this example, the project at the top of the list has been selected as shown by the black border around it. It’s currently inactive and indicated by the “Status” column and the gray characters. Clicking the “Active” button will activate the project.

View Project Button

The new “View Project” button, below the project list, opens the selected project.

In this example, the Carlsen-Kramnik project would be displayed in project view. The “View Project” button is equivalent to double-clicking the project or selecting it and pressing the Enter key.

IDeA Session Statistics

The “Statistics” button in the IDeA Control Center displays statistics about the current analysis session.

Here you can see at what time the analysis session started and the CPU efficiency. Of course you want the CPU efficiency to be as close to 100% as possible. In this case it is 95%, which means that the engines have been busy 95% of the time. The rest of the time (5%), they have waited for a task to analyze; e.g., while IDeA is minimaxing the analysis tree.

CPU efficiency can be low if you are starting a new project from scratch with several engine instances. In general, the efficiency will increase if you analyze more than one project at the same time.

Automatic Creation/Correction of Tree Configurations

It seems that tree configurations are the main cause of frustration for new IDeA users. This problem is addressed in the new Aquarium version.

If there is no tree configuration specified for an IDeA project, it will be created automatically when the IDeA Project View is opened.

IDeA also examines existing configurations when IDeA Project View is opened. It checks if the fields “Positions,” “IdeA,” and “Main tree” use the IDeA tree that the user selected for the project. If not, then they are updated to use the project’s IDeA tree.

In addition to this, all changes to tree configurations as well as IDeA project settings are now immediately saved to disk. The former is not limited to IDeA or IDeA tree configurations.

Engine Button in QAT

You can now customize the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) in IDeA view to display an “Engine” button that brings up the “IDeA Engines Setup” dialog box.

IDeA QAT customization

You can add the new button by right-clicking somewhere in the QAT and selecting “Customize.” Make sure that “idea” is displayed in the “Mode” drop-down list and then select “Engines” by clicking the check box in the “Visible” column. The “Engines” button (highlighted in the image above) will be added to the QAT when you click OK.

The new button is available both in the IDeA Control Center and IDeA Project View. Previously, you had to switch to the IDeA Control Center and click the “Engines” button in the ribbon to modify the IDeA engine list. As before, it can only be modified when IDeA isn’t running.

IDeA Project View

The Project View Ribbon has several new buttons, including new statistics buttons, which give you a new insight into the analysis tree, beyond what a simple score and position count can do.

The “Root Node” button allows you to add a new analysis root with a single click.

Add the current position as root

When you click the button the current position is added as a root. One of the most common operations in Aquarium 2010 IDeA is to add and remove root positions. As you’ll see later in this column, removing root positions has been made equally easy.

Next we come to a feature that truly deserves its own special column: The “Statistics” group in the Project View Ribbon. It opens up a completely new view of the analysis results. This can help you to better understand where to focus your analysis resources, how likely your opponent is to go wrong in different variations, if the IDeA analysis is likely to surprise an opponent who relies only on infinite analysis, etc.

IDeA statistics

The four statistics buttons are shown in the image above.

The leftmost button, Project, gives you numeric information about the project.

2D-Eval displays a chart showing the distribution of scores for the sub-tree starting in the current position.

MM-Delta graphs the differences between infinite analysis evaluations and the IDeA scores.

Branching charts the number of alternatives examined for moves following the current position. This helps you find positions where additional analysis may be needed.

IDeA project statistics

The first pane, “Overall statistics,” shows the total passes or stages that have been completed and how many tasks of each type (”Prolongation,” “Alternatives,” and “Deep Prolongation”) have been created. Finally the results of the “False Alarm” checks are shown.

The second pane is an overview of the latest “Prolongation” stage. It shows the total number of leaf nodes in the tree, how many of those were rejected because of the limit you have set on variation length and the number of analysis tasks that were generated.

You can reset these statistics at any time by clicking the “Reset” button.

The third pane, “Other,” is new and shows when the tree was last minimaxed, when the latest backup was created and how many positions the tree contains.

The 2D-Eval chart shows the frequency distribution of scores in the sub-tree starting from the current position. The chart title in the screenshot below shows that the current score is +0.52 pawns, which means that White has a slight advantage. The chart is based on the 5 best moves in each position.

IDeA project statistics

The X-axis shows evaluations, but the Y-axis the number of positions. Here we can for example see that 41.1% of positions in the sub-tree are equal.

There are many things you can read from the 2D-Eval chart. In this case, we see that the distribution is rather flat across the three highest bars where the bulk of the nodes fall. If a game is played from this position, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the evaluation changes and if it does it most likely will move towards equality. In an over the board game, Black should be able to draw the position, but he has to be careful.

If you right-click over a chart, you get the option to save it to a graphics file or copy it to the clipboard.

There are several options available for the 2D-Eval chart. There is a drop-down list in the upper-right corner of the chart where you can choose to chart the nodes for all moves, or just for a specific move.

Chart a selected move

By default all moves are charted, but the drop-down list shows all available moves along with their score. When you select a specific move the chart is immediately updated to reflect your selection.

There are also options at the bottom of the chart window where you can specify the maximum number of alternatives that are included in the statistics.

Limit the number of alternatives

In this example, “Best White moves limit” is set to one. This means that in positions where White is to move, only the best move is considered. “Best Black moves limit” is set to five, so Black’s five best moves are added to the chart. After modifying the values, you must click the “Refresh” button to update the chart.

Finally, there are a few common presets available for the number of alternatives considered for each side.

Presets for number of alternatives

If you select “everything” all nodes in the sub-tree will be included. The other options are are displayed as two numbers, separated by a colon. The first number stands for the number of white alternatives and the second one for the number of black alternatives. If you, for instance, select “1:5″ only the best move from White will be included, but Black’s five best moves will be included in the chart.

The next chart is the “MM-Delta.” It compares the IDeA scores for the positions in the tree with the infinite analysis evaluations.

Infinite analysis evaluations vs. IDeA

The statistics are broken down by the color, so you get several pairs of yellow and brown bars, where the former represents White’s moves and the latter Black’s moves.

The Y-axis shows the difference between the infinite analysis evaluation and the IDeA score, measured in percentages, which are commonly used in Aquarium when evaluations need to be converted to winning percentages. On this scale, 5-7% means that when translated to probability of winning, the difference between infinite analysis and IDeA is 5-7%.

Positions where there is less than 1% difference between infinite analysis and IDeA are not shown in the chart.

If you right-click over one of the bars in the chart and select “Add to Notes”, the positions corresponding to that bar are added to a note list (see the description of note lists above), where you can browse them and examine further. This feature can be quite interesting for positions where there is a big difference between infinite analysis and IDeA.

The options for selecting data for the chart are similar to those for the “2D-Eval” chart described above.

The third chart is the “Branching” chart. This shows you which positions have many candidate moves analyzed and which have fewer moves analyzed.

The Branching chart

You can, for instance, take advantage of this information to decide where you want to focus your analysis. The following options are available for this chart.

Branching chart options

If you click a point on the lines in the chart, the corresponding variation is displayed in a box below the chart. You can then click “Go to position” to view the position on the board in Aquarium.

The chart can show moves for “Both Sides,” as in this example above or only for the “Current Side.” The chart can be limited to the best candidate moves, by specifying a low “Evaluation delta.” After changing delta, you must click “Refresh” to update the chart.

I have only described the technical part of using the new charts above. Their practical application is much more exciting, and an Aquarium user (”buffos”) will soon publish some interesting examples of their application on the Aquarium support forum. You should definitely check the forum, because it has a lot of useful information about Aquarium.

Project Status Window

The Project Status window has three improvements, which make working with IDeA faster and more convenient.

The improved Project Status window

The first change is that the “Analysis settings” is now a link that brings up the “Analysis Quality Settings” dialog box with a single click. Previously you had to switch to the IDeA Control Center to change the seconds/position, depth, maximum time, etc.

The second change makes working with root nodes more convenient. In the example above, you see three “Root nodes” links: “52 root node(s),” “(1/2),” and “disable this root.” When you click the second link, you cycle through the active roots. The first number (”1″ in this example) shows the current root and the second number (”2″ in this example) shows the total number of active root nodes. The third link is only displayed when the current position is a root node. If it is enabled, as it is in this example, the link shows “disable this root” so you can disable it with a single click. If the root is currently disabled, the link changes to “enable this root” and clicking it enables the root node. In the previous version you had to open the Root Node List to disable and enable root nodes. Clicking the leftmost link (here “52 root node(s)”) displays the improved Root Node List dialog box, shown below.

The new Root Node List dialog

The following improvements have been made since the initial Aquarium 2010 release:

1. The “Eval” column, showing the current score of the root node has been added.
2. The “Position” column now shows the final moves leading up to the root position, if they are available. Previously, only the FEN string for the position was displayed. This makes it much easier for the user to remember how the position shown on the board (missing from the image) arose.
3. The “Comment” column let’s you add comments to individual root positions. This can be very useful if you have several root positions.
4. If you open the Root Node List, where the current position is a root node (active or inactive), then the corresponding line is highlighted in the Root Node List. An example can be seen in the image above, where the third line from the bottom is highlighted.

The third and final improvement to the Project Status window is the addition of four lists that you can use for storing important positions along with verbal commentary. The names of the lists indicate what kind of positions they are intended for: “Good,” “Interesting,” “Critical,” and “Dubious.” As you can see when you look at the Project Status window image above, each list is displayed as two links, similar to the root nodes, and the links work in a similar manner. The two links are the name of the list (e.g., “Critical”) and a link with two numbers separated by a slash. The first number stands for the current position in the list and the second number is the total number of positions in the list. Clicking the numbers displays the next position in the list. When you reach the end of the list, it rewinds to the start of the list. Using this feature you can quickly scan the positions in each list. Clicking the name of the list displays the “Note List” dialog box. An example is shown in the next image.

A Note List dialog

As you can see, the “Note List” dialog box is similar to the “Root Node List.” For every position, you can see when it was added to the list, it’s current and initial score (the score when it was added to the list) and the most important piece of information, your notes about the position. You can edit, copy and paste the commentary. Right-clicking on an item in the list opens a menu where you can copy or move the position to other note lists. Double-clicking an item in the list opens the position setup dialog box.

There are five buttons at the bottom of the “Note List.” The leftmost button let’s you “Remove” the currently selected position, while “Remove All” deletes all positions from the list. The next button is “Add Board Position”; this is a quick way of adding the position displayed on the main board to the list. If you run into an interesting position that you want to remember, click the “Interesting” link in the Project Status window and then this button. It is disabled in the screenshot, because the current position is already in the list. When you are done, click the OK button to store your changes, or Cancel to ignore them.

Once you have opened the “Note List” dialog box, there is a drop-down list below the chess board (not shown in the image above), which lets you switch between the available lists.

Whenever you open a list and the current position is in the list, it will be highlighted. This applies both to the note lists and the root node list. An example can be seen in the image above, where the first position in the list is the current position.

Stage Status Window

The first thing you will notice about the Stage Status window in the new version is that the task queue looks different.

The Stage Status window

Instead of a fully expanded queue with one square for each task, only the tasks that are being analyzed are displayed individually. The leftmost gray square shows that there are eight finished tasks. There are two green squares, which represent the tasks that are currently being analyzed. You can click an active task to see the engine analysis. In this example, the second active task has been selected and you can follow its analysis in the space below the queue. The yellow square shows that there are 14 tasks in the queue waiting to be analyzed.

One of the reasons for this change is to allow the processing of large EPD files when showing each individual task would not be practical.

A new menu item has been added to the “Manage” menu in the Stage Status window.

Make an accurate position count

The “Fill Subtree Power” scans every position in the tree and makes an accurate count of positions that can be reached from it. It is the same operation as was described above when the new features of the IDeA “Stop” button were described. Note that this is a very time consuming operation and you should not use it for trees with more than 30,000 positions.

IDeA Notation Window

There is one change in the IDeA notation window, which clears IDeA related highlighting from the notation and then displays all root positions, both active and inactive, with a blue color.

Reset IDeA marks

If you want to highlight the root moves and remove highlighting from positions that were manually added to IDeA, right-click over the notation window and select “Reset IDeA marks” from the menu.

Conclusion

As you have seen in this column, the new Aquarium 2010 version is a major update. It offers new features, such as the correspondence chess module, and numerous changes that were designed to improve the usability of Aquarium 2010. Best of all, the new version is free for current users!

The 19th traditional TopGM’s blindfold and rapid tournament in Nice, France will be held from March 13th to 25th.
Players: Levon Aronian (Armenia), Magnus Carlsen (Norway), Leinier Dominguez (Cuba), Vugar Gashimov (Azerbaijan), Boris Gelfand (Israel), Alexander Grischuk (Russia), Vasily Ivanchuk (Ukraine), Sergey Karjakin (Russia), Vladimir Kramnik (Russia), Ruslan Ponomariov, Jan Smeets (The Netherlands) and Peter Svidler.

Magnus Carlsen (2813) (NOR) brVladimir Kramnik (2790) (RUS) brLevon Aronian (2782) (ARM) brAlexander Grischuk (2756) (RUS) brPeter Svidler (2750) (RUS) brBoris Gelfand (2750) (ISR) brVasily Ivanchuk (2748) (UKR) brVugar Gashimov (2740) (AZE) brRuslan Ponomariov (2737) (UKR) brSergey Karjakin (2725) (RUS) brLeinier Dominguez (2713) (CUB) brJan Smeets (2651) (NED)

A new version of Aquarium 2010 (version 4.0.3) will be released soon. It’s a free update for current Aquarium 2010 users. One of the new features is a correspondence chess module that keeps track of correspondence games played on Xfcc compliant chess servers. The Xfcc protocol was designed by Martin Bennedik. Servers of this type include the International Correspondence Chess Federation (ICCF), SchemingMind.com, and myChess.de.

Correspondence chess has changed a lot in recent years; transitioning from snail-mail to email and now to server based play. Aquarium only supports server based play, which without doubt is the most convenient method of playing.

When playing correspondence chess, you must, of course, respect the rules regarding the use of chess engines. Some servers allow them (e.g., ICCF in most events), while their use is forbidden on other servers. Some servers allow the use of engines under special circumstances. As an example, SchemingMind only allows their use in “Advanced chess.”

For the purposes of this column, I will assume that you have already registered and joined a tournament on one of the supported servers.

Aquarium for Correspondence Players

Correspondence players normally play several games at the same time and Aquarium supports simultaneous analysis of multiple games and positions using either traditional infinite analysis or the innovative IDeA (Interactive Deep Analysis) method that explores and expands critical lines automatically.

IDeA in action

Many correspondence players already make extensive use of IDeA. The improvements in Aquarium 2010 were especially useful for them (multiple projects, positions and engine instances). Although IDeA can be used as a fully automatic tool, it really shines when the player takes advantage of its interactive features. IDeA records all its results in an “analysis tree.” This is a valuable feature for correspondence players, as they can later access their stored analysis from any game where a previously analyzed position arises. If you find yourself playing the same opening again, you can expand your analysis tree, searching for interesting alternatives, novelties, etc.

The implementation of infinite analysis in Aquarium also has many convenient features (see Infinite Analysis with Rybka Aquarium) for correspondence players. Several engines can be used to analyze different games at the same time and analysis presets (see Analysis Presets in Rybka Aquarium) let you use more than one engine to analyze the same position and quickly switch between different engines and methods.

The image below shows an example of three games being analyzed with infinite analysis. One of the positions is displayed on the board with the analysis window below the board. This game is highlighted in the sidebar with a blue background.

Simultaneous analysis of three games

A red rectangle has been drawn around the three games. You can always see which games are being analyzed by the green rectangle next to the game in the sidebar as shown below.

Green rectangle indicates analysis

Many of you will notice that this is the same icon as is shown in the status bar for each active engine.

As mentioned above, both IDeA and infinite analysis support simultaneous analysis by multiple engines. In the case of IdeA, it would normally be multiple instances of the same engine. Both methods can also take advantage of analysis on networked computers as described in Networked Computers with Aquarium 2010. This means that you can combine the analysis power of several computers.

Networked analysis with thirty-four engines

There are many other Aquarium features that are useful for correspondence players. Browsing the Aquarium articles archives should give you insight into some of them. For a quick overview of various smaller features see Aquarium’s Hidden Treasures, Part One and Aquarium’s Hidden Treasures, Part Two.

The only thing that has been missing for playing correspondence chess in Aquarium is a tool for live updates of games (sending and receiving moves from the server). This may seem like a minor issue that can be solved by copy/paste to and from the server. Technically that is correct. However, correspondence players must perform this action thousands of times a year, and they need to take great care not to make a “technical” mistake, as it can easily lead to the loss of a game. It’s frustrating to see hours or days of analysis go down the drain due to such a mistake.

The Aquarium correspondence play module is designed to minimize manual intervention and thereby the chance of mistakes. It accepts moves automatically from the server. When a game is saved, all previous analysis is preserved, the game is activated and you can instantly start analyzing the position.

Getting Started

Click the Aquarium Button in the upper left corner, select “External programs” and then “Correspondence Play” from the right pane to start the module.

Starting the correspondence chess module

The Correspondence Play module will appear on the screen as shown below.

The correspondence chess module

The first step is to tell the program which correspondence chess server(s) you want to use. Click the “Server options” button and the corresponding dialog box will be displayed.

Add the servers to which you want to connect

Here you can add, edit, and remove servers. Note that you can connect to more than one server. Near the bottom you can specify how often the program checks for new information on the servers (once every sixty minutes in this case). Click the “Add” button to add a new server.

Specify a new server

Here you enter information that is required to connect to the server and retrieve information about your games.

Server name is a name you choose to identify the server; e.g., ICCF for the ICCF server. You can use any name you like.

Server address is the URL used for Xfcc communication with the server. You will usually find the address to use in the help file or the FAQ of the server. The correct addresses for SchemingMind.com and ICCF are given as examples in the dialog box. For your convenience, here are the addresses for the three servers mentioned at the beginning of the column. You can copy the address of the server you want to connect to and paste it into the server address field:

• ICCF: http://www.iccf-webchess.com/XfccBasic.asmx
• SchemingMind.com: http://www.schemingmind.com/xfcc/xfccbasic.asmx
• myChess.de: http://www.myChess.de/xfcc/xfccbasic.php4

User name is your username on the server. As mentioned earlier, you need to register on the server through their website.

Password is the password you use when logging onto the server.

After filling out these fields, click OK and a list of your games will be fetched from the server and displayed on the screen as shown in the screen-shot below.

Connected to server

If you select a game from the list, it is displayed at the top of the screen and the current position is shown on the board.

The game list

If a game in the list is shown in bold (such as the first line in the list), it’s your turn to move. When a new move arrives, the corresponding game is shown in red type until you select the game; after that it’s shown in bold. The list above shows two red games.

The list itself consists of the following columns:

The leftmost column (#) shows the identification (game number) that the server has assigned to this game.

Col shows your color in the game. Yellow means that you have white and brown means that you have the black pieces.

Opponent is your opponent’s name.

Event shows the name of the event or tournament. It is assigned by the server when the event starts.

Your time shows how much time you have remaining until the next time control.

Opp. time shows how much time your opponent has left until the next time control.

Status shows the current status of the game. When a game is in progress it shows the current move. When a game is finished it shows the result.

Comment allows you to keep notes about the game. They are your private notes and are not sent to your opponent. This is very useful for correspondence players with many games. They can use the notes to get a quick overview of the games. The notes can be used for your evaluation of the position, what needs to be checked, how you intend to analyze, etc. The Comment column is not shown in the image, but here is an example of how it can be used.

Private comments about the games

The text wraps automatically, but you can also press Ctrl+Enter to force a new line.

Saving Games to a Database

You can enter moves and variations directly on the board in the correspondence chess module and then send your move to the server without using Aquarium at all. However, a serious player will always save his games to the database and do his analysis there. Even while playing the first few moves, he needs to research the opening repertoire of his opponent and look up the latest games in the opening variation that is being played. So, after connecting to the server and getting a list of your games, the next step is to save the server games to a local database.

First, you need to create the database. Click the “Base options” button. The “Database Options” dialog box will appear.

Create/select a database for the games

Here you should click the ellipsis button to the right of the “Save game to database” field. It opens up a standard Windows dialog for choosing a database name and a directory for storing it. After selecting a directory and choosing a name for the database, click the OK button. Your database will be created and you can start saving your games.

There are two scenarios to think about when you save new games from the server.

If you don’t have any previous analysis of the game or you don’t want to merge the game with existing analysis, just select the game from the list (by clicking it) and then click the “Save” button. The game will be appended to the database as a new game. Note that when you save the game, it will automatically be opened in Aquarium where you have full access to it and all other games in the database.

This was simple enough, but if you just started to use the correspondence chess module and already have a lot of analysis for the games, you can choose to merge the server game into an existing game. This is a convenient way of taking advantage of your previous analytical work. In this case, do the following (note that this is only required the first time you save the game):

1. Open Aquarium (if it isn’t already running)
2. Open the database that you defined above.
3. Open the game containing the existing analysis. You will merge your server game with this game.
4. Switch back to the correspondence chess module and select the game you want to save
5. Press “Save.” The following dialog box will appear.

Merge game with existing game analysis?

If you select “Yes,” the server game will be merged with the game you opened in Aquarium. If you select “No,” the server game will be appended to the database as a new game.

If you change your mind and don’t want to save the game, click “Cancel.”

Remember that this process is only needed the first time that you save this game to the database. Once you have done that, simply press “Save” when you want to update the game in the database after a new move has been made.

Note that your analysis of the games in Aquarium will stay private, so there is no need to keep one copy of the game with your analysis and another “clean” copy without annotations. If you need to see the bare game score, you can always do so in the correspondence chess module.

For the more technically minded, the link between your correspondence game and the game in the database is maintained in Config/xfccBasesList.xml. If you delete an entry in that file (you can find the game by its id), then that link is broken and you can re-link it.

Making a Move

You can make your move either directly in the correspondence chess module or start by selecting the move in Aquarium itself. Both methods are described below.

Making a move in the correspondence chess module is very simple. Just make your move on the board and click the “Make move” button. You will be presented with the following window.

Sending a move to the server

The move you are going to send is shown in large, red type at the top of the window. There are two text areas below the move. The one at the top shows your opponent’s comments for his previous move (if any). You can write a message to your opponent in the lower text area and it will be delivered with the move.

There are four radio buttons below the text areas. In this example, two of them are active and you can use them to resign or offer a draw. “Accept draw” is inactive unless your opponent has offered a draw, in which case you would select it to accept the draw. “Claim draw” is only active when you can claim a draw according to the laws of chess. That’s all there is to it when you make your move using the correspondence chess module.

You can also start by selecting your move in Aquarium if you have previously saved the game to the database as described above. Start by opening the game in Aquarium. Go to the current position in the game. Move the mouse pointer to the tree window, right-click the move you want to make (23.Nxb5 in this example) and select “XFCC Play” from the menu as shown in the next image.

Sending a move from Aquarium

The correspondence chess module will be opened and the selected move will be played on the board. Now you can submit it by clicking “Make move” as described above.

It would be interesting to receive feedback from users about this method of selecting the move from the tree window. It does have the advantage that it practically forces you to look at its evaluation before you submit it (assuming engine analysis is allowed). In the image above, 23.Nxb5 has the best score (+0.00), but you would probably hesitate and recheck everything if you saw another move with a better score. If you have a better suggestion, I’m sure that the developers would like to hear about it.

Conclusion

The new Aquarium correspondence chess module gives you a unified method of playing your games on Xfcc compliant servers. You get a quick overview of all your games in a single list, even if you have games in progress on all these servers. The list has a very useful comment field for each game, where you can enter your private notes. When you make your moves, many of the possible sources of error are eliminated. Games can be saved directly in an Aquarium database where you can check opening statistics, look up the position in endgame tablebases or use Aquarium’s analysis tools. The combination of Aquarium’s powerful analysis features and the new correspondence chess module makes Aquarium a one stop solution for correspondence players.

The 27th traditional TopGM’s tournament in Linares, Spain will be held from Feb 13th to Feb 24th.
Players: Veselin Topalov (BUL, 2805), Levon Aronian (ARM, 2781), Boris Gelfand (ISR, 2761), Vugar Gashimov (AZE, 2759), Alexander Grischuk (RUS, 2736), Francisco Vallejo Pons (ESP, 2705).

Tournament format: Double round-robin.
Average ELO is 2758, 21th FIDE tournament category.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka Aquarium commentary.
Games:

Veselin Topalov (2805) (BUL) brLevon Aronian (2781) (ARM) brBoris Gelfand (ISR) (2761) brVugar Gashimov (AZE) (2759) brAlexander Grischuk (RUS) (2736) brVallejo Pons (ESP) (2705)

ChessOK has new, freshly printed chess books to offer:

— Theory and Practice of Chess Endings 1
— Theory and Practice of Chess Endings 2
Excellent endgame books. The author, grandmaster Alexander Panchenko, being one the most known coaches of Soviet Union Chess School collected the material for nearly 20 years. It has been used it to train from the beginners to grandmaster levels many of his students. Panchenko considers that chess training should begin from the endgame. Those books teach you typical moves and plans in all kinds of endgames and then test the acquired knowledge.

— King’s Gambit
King’s gambit is one of the oldest openings, but its still actual, despite the age. International grandmaster Nikolai Kalinichenko collected and commented 300 most representative games in King’s gambit, that would help you become familiar with many subtleties, and tactical ideas in this opening.

— Play 2…Nf6! in the Sicilian
The author, a recognized expert on the variation, has summarized and fully systemized his many years of experience in the given field. His views are subjective - but this is what makes them valuable. Playing this variant with black can often be an unpleasant surprise for white.

Also don’t miss out two new articles: Aquarium Hidden Treasures, Part two which speaks of many not-so-obvious features and tricks of Aquairum and Networked Computers with Aquarium 2010 which describes how to use Aquarium in a network of the computers to increase the analysis power.

What do all the green squares in the image below represent?

Seasoned Aquarium users will immediately recognize that this is a screen-shot of the Aquarium status bar (split into two lines) where each square represents one chess engine (Rybka in this case). What is unusual here is the huge number of chess engines: thirty-four instances of Rybka, all analyzing at the same time, running on a network of computers! It is an amazing experience to have so much analysis power at your fingertips.

It is becoming more common that players have access to more than one computer on their home network. With Aquarium 2010 it is possible to run chess analysis on a network of computers, either on a local network or over the Internet. The image above is taken from one such analysis session.

In the following, a “local engine” is used to describe an engine running on the same computer as Aquarium, but a “remote engine” runs on a different computer.

The Benefit of Analysis on Networked Computers

A single chess engine can only use the CPUs of the computer on which it is running. At least this applies to currently available chess engines. Using Aquarium as a central point for managing multiple chess engines running on a network of computers gives you additional computing power, which can be used in various ways to speed up and improve your analysis.

More computing power can be used to get faster results, which is important if you have limited time or if you simply want to use more time for other things. You can analyze deeper, or examine more positions and games in the same amount of time.

The additional computer(s) allow you to run more chess engines at the same time; e.g., to get a “second opinion” of a position. You can view the position from various angles by letting a few engines (Rybka, Shredder, etc.) analyze in single variation mode while others use multi-variation analysis and perhaps one engine analyzes the opponent’s threats at the same time. The new IDeA (Interactive Deep Analysis) version in Aquarium 2010 was also designed to take advantage of a network of computers for its analysis.

Practically anyone who has access to two or more computers can take advantage of chess analysis on networked computers with Aquarium 2010, even if the computers are in different countries!

In general, the players that will benefit most from the additional analysis power of networked computers are the more serious top-level players, correspondence players, opening analysts, etc.

Few users have access to the computing power required to run as many engines as shown above, but as soon as you have one additional computer hooked up to your Aquarium, new opportunities for analysis arise.

Even if you never use more than one chess engine at the same time for your analysis, you may still want to consider using a remote engine. It gives you more flexibility and allows you to use the engine from different computers. You can, for instance, run the engine on your most powerful computer and use it from Aquarium running on your laptop, whenever that suits you. With a little computer network knowledge you can even access it via the Internet.

The more advanced your analysis techniques are and the more computers you have, the more Aquarium’s networked engine approach has to offer. If you use IDeA, either alone or in combination with infinite analysis, the networked approach is a very attractive option.

Of course the basic requirement is that you actually have access to networked computers to take advantage of the analysis features that are the subject of this column. If you do have access to networked computers, the addition of remote engines never limits your existing analysis options, but adds new ones. Therefore, the only question is how much you will benefit from the addition of remote engines. The simpler your analysis methods are the less you will gain. As an example, a user who never uses analysis presets, always analyzes with a single engine, and doesn’t use IDeA will gain much less than someone who uses multiple engines, analysis presets, and IDeA.

If you own two computers, but they are not connected on a network, you can still use them both for analysis (although you can’t use remote engines), as you are allowed to install Aquarium on computers that you own. For some types of analysis, it is a question of working habits and whether you prefer the networked engine approach or separate instances of Aquarium running on different computers.

The Types of Analysis on Networked Computers

Remote engines can be used for any type of analysis in Aquarium:

• Infinite analysis. Any combination of local and networked engines can be used for infinite analysis. As you may remember from previous columns on Infinite Analysis with Rybka Aquarium, you can analyze simultaneously with many engines, even positions from different games. In Analysis Presets in Rybka Aquarium, I described how you can create a quickly accessible “analysis preset” that can be used for analyzing any position simultaneously with different engines and different analysis settings (normal infinite analysis, multi-variation analysis, threats, etc.). Both local and networked engines can be used in the same analysis preset.
• IDeA (Interactive Deep Analysis). The new IDeA version in Aquarium 2010 is designed with analysis on a network of computers in mind. To my knowledge, the largest number of engines that has been used simultaneously for analysis in IDeA is forty-four.
• Game Analysis and Find Blunders. The analysis engine used here can either be a local engine or a remote engine. Note that you can’t analyze multiple games simultaneously using these analysis methods, although you can automatically analyze a list of games sequentially.

Remote engines can also be used in matches and tournaments, except for Randomizer matches.

How to Use a Remote Engine in Aquarium

I assume that you have already installed Aquarium 2010. We will call the computer where Aquarium is running the “master computer.” Now you want to set up a remote engine on another computer (a “slave computer”) and then use it from Aquarium. The following steps are required:

1. Install the engine and engine server software on the slave computer.
2. Configure the engine server on the slave computer.
3. Install the remote engine in Aquarium on the master computer.

These three steps are described below. After you have completed them, you can use the remote engine for analysis in Aquarium.

Installing a Remote Engine Server

Besides the engine itself, you need to install the RTHomeServer (which is available as a free download) on the slave computer. For simplicity, I will install both components into the same directory.

1a) Create a directory and copy the engine you want to use into the new directory.

1b) Download the RTHomeServer and save the downloaded file into the new directory.

1c) Extract RTHomeServer.rar (with WinRar or WinZip). After that you should see several files in the new directory, including RTSingleServer.exe, which is the remote engine server.

Now, all the required software is available and the next step is to configure the remote engine server.

Configuring the Remote Engine Server

One of the files contained in the new directory is RTSingleServer.ini, which contains the engine server configuration. At this stage, the goal is to get the server up and running, so I will only change the essential parameters.

2a) Open RTSingleServer.ini with a text editor, such as Notepad.

2b) Note the second line in the file: port=7788. The port number specified here (7788) is needed later on for the remote engine setup within Aquarium as described below.

2c) The third line in the file is engine=rybka.exe. Change rybka.exe to the name of the engine you are going to use (the one you copied to the new directory in step 1a above). An example is engine=Rybka 3 1-cpu w32.exe. Here I use the single-core version of Rybka 3 32-bit. Save the changes you have made and exit Notepad.

Finally, you need to find the IP address of the computer running the engine server. If you don’t know what an IP address is or how to find it, see the next two sections. You need the IP address when setting up the remote engine in Aquarium.

The IP Address

Every computer on a network has a unique identifying number, called an IP address. A typical IP address on your local network might look like this:

192.168.1.127

IP addresses are normally expressed as a “dotted decimal number” like the one above.

If a program needs to communicate with another computer on a network, it must to know its IP address. As an example, when Aquarium wants to use a remote engine it needs to know the IP address of the slave computer where the engine server is running.

Finding the IP Address of the Slave Computer

The following describes how you can find the IP address of a computer running Windows 7, Vista, XP, or 2000.

1. Click Start and then select All Programs (Windows 7, Vista, and XP) or Programs (2000).
2. Click Accessories and then Command Prompt.
3. At the command prompt, enter: ipconfig

The output from the command will display the IP address (or IPv4 address if you are using Windows 7 or Vista). The example shown in the image below comes from Windows XP. The IP address is highlighted.

Adding a Remote Engine to Aquarium 2010

At this point you should have completed the configuration of the remote engine server and have the following information handy:

1. The IP address of the remote engine server
2. The port number specified in the server’s configuration file

Start Aquarium on the master computer and switch to Engines view by clicking the Engines button in the sidebar. Click the Add button to install the remote engine. The “New engine properties” dialog box will be brought up.

Here you must set Type to “Remote UCI” and give the engine a name (I have selected “Remote Rybka 1″ in this example). Next, click the Setup button in the lower left corner.

Server is the IP address of the slave computer where the remote engine server runs.

Port is the port number that is specified in the configuration file of the remote engine server.

User is not used in the current version of the remote engine server. Set it to anything you like. “MyUsername” is used in the example shown in the image.

Pass is your password, but it’s not used in the current version of the remote engine server. Set it to anything you like. “MyPassword” is used in this example.

Reconnect can be left as it is.

After specifying the parameters, click OK, and then OK again, and the remote engine has been configured within Aquarium.

Determining if the Remote Engine was Successfully Installed

Go to the computer where you installed the remote engine server (the slave computer) and start it by double-clicking the RTSingleServer application. The small window shown below should be opened.

The engine server is ready for use. Now you can go to the master computer where you run Aquarium 2010. Start Aquarium and switch to the Sandbox. Select the Analysis tab on the ribbon and click Start Custom.

Here you will see the newly installed remote engine (”Remote Rybka 1″ in this example) listed among other installed engines. After selecting the engine, click OK and if everything works as expected, the remote engine will start analyzing the current position.

Look at the computer where the engine server is running to see if a connection is established and the username you selected when installing the engine in Aquarium is listed in the “Users” list.

Running Multiple Remote Engines on the Same Computer

If your slave computer has more than one core, you can use it to run multiple remote engines simultaneously. It is quite common, for instance, that IDeA users analyze with multiple single-core Rybkas on the same computer. When running the engines, you must of course make sure that they don’t use more cores than the computer has.

Each additional remote engine requires its own engine server software and must be installed into a separate directory. Otherwise, the process for installation and configuration is the same as described above, except that each server must use a unique port number. When we installed the engine server above, we left the port number unchanged in the configuration file (7788). For the next engine server on the same computer, you could use port number 7789, 7790 for the third one, etc. You also need to use these port numbers when you install each remote engine in Aquarium. If all the engine servers are running on the same slave computer, the IP address would be the same, of course.

Let’s say that you want to install four single-core Rybkas on a quad computer. You would start by creating four directories and copy the engine and the engine server software into all of them. After that you would edit the configuration file in each directory and change the engine and the port number as explained above. Finally, you would go to the master computer, start Aquarium, and install the four remote engines. They would all use the same IP address (since they are located on the same computer), but different port numbers.

Using Remote Engines on Two Different Computers

There is no hard limit on the number of slave computers that Aquarium can control. Simply install the engine and engine server on each slave computer as explained above. Note that it is OK to use the same port numbers on different computers. If you have two dual core computers and wish to run two single-core engines on both of them, you can use port numbers 7788 and 7789 on both computers.

It is best to test each remote engine in Aquarium after it has been installed, so you discover any problems as early as possible.

Connecting to Remote Engines Across the Internet

You can run engines on the master computer where Aquarium is running, computers on your local area network, and computers connected over the Internet all at the same time. It doesn’t matter where in the world the slave computers are located as long as you can connect to them.

Changing the Hash Size of a Remote Engine

By default, the hash size of remote engines is 32MB, regardless of your settings in Aquarium. You can either edit the configuration file and set the hash size to a different value or modify it so that the value specified in Aquarium overrides the default value in the engine server.

Open the configuration file (RTSingleServer.ini) with Notepad and look for the following lines:

[engine]
Hash=32

Here you can change the default hash size to a different value. Just remember, that the more remote engines you are going to run on a computer the lower the value must be.

The reason why the server doesn’t allow you to change the hash size from Aquarium can be found in the [client] section of the configuration file:

[client]
Hash=
Max CPUs=

By default, the options listed in the [client] section can’t be changed from Aquarium. If you remove the first line in the section (Hash=), the hash size specified in Aquarium will be used for the remote engine.

Also note that by default Max CPUs cannot be changed from Aquarium unless you also remove the third line shown above, “Max CPUs=.”

Advanced users should be able to understand most of the options in the configuration file by reading the comments and by having a look at the read-me file.

Conclusion

Analysis on networked computers gives you more flexibility and additional analysis power. In this column I have explained how to install and configure remote engines. After that you can use them just like any other engine in Aquarium. When used for infinite analysis, remote engines are a perfect match for Aquarium’s analysis presets, which have good support for multi-engine analysis. Remote engines are also ideal for IDeA analysis as many Aquarium 2010 users have already discovered.

ChessOK has three new training packages avilable:

— Training Package for Beginners €47.96 / $59.95
Training Package for Beginners includes huge, carefully selected material to improve the skill level of newer players. You learn the very basics of chess, general mating patterns and proceed to more advanced tactical levels.

— Training Package Club Players €47.96 / $59.95
Training Package for Club players covers wide range of opening, middlegame, and endgame subjects. It teaches how to avoid typical opening blunders and contains thousands of tactical exercises of different difficulty.

— Training Package Intermediate Players €47.96 / $59.95
Training Package for Inermediate players is dedicated to experienced chess enthusiasts with ELO rating above 1600. It gives you theoretical knowledge of various openings, improves tactical skills and teaches the principles of chess strategy.

The 72nd traditional Corus Chess tournament will be held in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands from Jan 15th to Jan 31st. There are going to be three groups as usual

Group A average ELO is 2719. It is 19th FIDE tournament category.
All rounds except for the final round start at 12:30 GMT. The Final round will start at 11:30 GMT.
ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of group A tournament with Rybka Aquarium commentary.

Magnus Carlsen (2810) (NOR) brViswanathan Anand (2790) (IND) brVladimir Kramnik (2788) (RUS) brVassily Ivanchuk (2749) (UKR) brPeter Leko (2739) (HUN) brAlexei Shirov (2723) (SPA) brSergey Karjakin (2720) (RUS) brLeinier Dominguez (2712) (CUB) brHikaru Nakamura (2708) (USA) brNigel Short (2696) (ENG) brFabiano Caruana (2675) (ITA) brSergey Tiviakov (2662) (NED) brJan Smeets (2657) (NED) brLoek van Wely (2641) (NED)

Round 1 - Jan 16th

Round 2 - Jan 17th

Round 3 - Jan 18th

Round 4 - Jan 19th

Round 5 - Jan 21st

Round 6 - Jan 22nd

Round 7 - Jan 23rd

Round 8 - Jan 24th

Round 9 - Jan 26th

Round 10 - Jan 27th

Round 11 - Jan 29th

Round 12 - Jan 30th

Round 13 - Jan 31st

The World Team Championship take place in Bursa, Turkey 3rd-14th January 2010. The first round was on 5th January 2010, and there will be no rest day. The event has taken place every 4 years since 1985. The official title for the event is the World Team Championship 2009 as it should have taken place last year.
Teams: Russia, Brazil, Egypt, India, Armenia, Israel, USA, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Greece.

Crosstable

Round 3 LIVE

• ChessBase Express Report
  
• Video Interview with Magnus Carlsen by Peter Doggers at ChessVibes
• Round 7 Games Annotated,  Mark Crowther at TWIC
• Carlsen Wins; Nakamura Mid-Field by Ian Rogers at USCF
  
• Short - Carlsen, Jason Juett at Chessdom
• Round 7 Games Annotated, Rybka at ChessOK
  

• Kramnik and Ni Hua Win, Carlsen Escapes by John Saunders at ChessBase
  
• Kramnik and Ni Hua Win in Round 6 by Peter Doggers at ChessVibes
  Includes video of Short and Ni Hua analyzing their game.
• Carlsen - Adams, Raymond Keene at Times Online
  
• Carlsen - Adams, Pete Karagianis at Chessdom
  
• London Classic Final Round by Mig Greengard
  In a post looking toward the final round of play, Greengard nicely sums up the penultimate round action.
• Round 6 Games Annotated, Rybka at ChessOK
  

• Carlsen and McShane Win by John Saunders at ChessBase
• Ni Hua - Carlsen, John Saunders
• Nakamura - McShane, John Saunders
• Round 5 Games Annotated, Dennis Monokroussos
• Round 5 Games Annotated, Rybka at ChessOK
  
• Ni Hua - Carlsen, Jason Juett at Chessdom
  
• London Classic: Kramnik Comeback; Carlsen Human (Maybe) by Mig Greengard
  A good summary of the action through round 5.
  

• All Games Drawn but Fighting Chess by John Saunders at ChessBase
• Round 4 Games Annotated, Dennis Monokroussos
• Round 4 Games Annotated, Mark Crowther at TWIC
• Round 4 Games Annotated, Rybka at ChessOK
  
• Carlsen - Nakamura, John Saunders
• Short - Ni Hua, John Saunders
• Carlsen - Nakamura, Ian Rogers at USCF
• Carlsen - Nakamura, Jason Juett at Chessdom
  
• Carlsen - Nakamura, Malcolm Pein in the London Telegraph
  

• Kramnik Wins Again, Carlsen Leads by John Saunders at ChessBase
• McShane - Kramnik, John Saunders
• Howell - Carlsen, John Saunders
• Howell - Carlsen, Malcolm Pein (also at TWIC)
  
• McShane - Kramnik, Malcolm Pein (also at TWIC)
• Howell - Carlsen, Jason Juett and Peter Karagianis at Chessdom
• Round 3 Games Annotated, Rybka at ChessOK
  

• Kramnik and Carlsen Analyzed by John Saunders at ChessBase
• Kramnik - Ni Hua, John Saunders
• Carlsen - McShane, John Saunders
• Round 2 Games Annotated, Vallejo Pons at the official site
  
• Round 2 Games Annotated, Mark Crowther at TWIC
• Round 2 Games Annotated, Rybka at ChessOK
  
• Thirty Love, Carlsen Beats McShane photos by Frederic Friedel at ChessBase
• London Classic: Carlsen Starts Hot by Mig Greengard
• Kramnik - Ni Hua, Malcolm Pein at TWIC
• Carlsen - McShane, Christian Bauer and Peter Karagianis at Chessdom
  
• Adams - Nakamura, Christian Bauer and Peter Karagianis at Chessdom
  

• C is for Carlsen by John Saunders at ChessBase
  Carlsen explains his win over Kramnik in the first round.
• Round 1 Games Annotated, Dennis Monokroussos 
• Round 1 Games Annotated, Mark Crowther
• Round 1 Games Annotated, Vallejo Pons at the official site
• Round 1 Games Annotated, Rybka at ChessOK
  
• Carlsen - Kramnik, John Saunders
  
• Carlsen - Kramnik, Lubomir Kavalek, Washington Post
• Carlsen - Kramnik, Malcolm Pein
• Carlsen - Kramnik,  Hector Leyva at InforChess
  
• Carlsen - Kramnik at Chessdom
• Nakamura - Ni Hua at Chessdom
  

• People and Personalities at the London Chess Classic, photos by Frederic Friedel
  
• London Chess Classic Photographs at The Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog
  

There is no need to introduce Rybka to ChessOK.com visitors, who have been using it as a part of the Rybka Aquarium package. However, the man behind the strongest chess engine in the world, Vasik Rajlich, is probably little known outside the circle of computer chess enthusiasts. The following interview with Vas, conducted by Nelson Hernandez, should be of great interest to every Rybka user who wants to know Vas’ views and where he is heading with the next Rybka versions. We are at crossroads in the chess engine market. What will the changes mean for the serious chess player?

Here is a word from Nelson Hernandez:

I’m happy to contribute this exchange Vas and I had on December 5th, him in Warsaw, me in Virginia.

The back story…the idea for this production came to me in November and Vas readily agreed to do the project. The whole thing was done on virtually a zero budget and in some respects that shows. I had never done anything like this before and had no experience whatsoever in interviewing or film editing. It turned out that interviewing was fairly easy but the film editing was a grueling process. On my side I had the benefit of my younger son being a cameraman/director but on Vas’s side Iweta wanted nothing to do with the project, a source of hilarity at the time but a bit of a disappointment in terms of camera angles and sound (both of which were rather poor on his end). We shot about 2 1/2 hours on two camcorders; I’m sure some of the edited-out material would be of mild interest too; for instance I chopped out about ten minutes on chess programming which, in the end, I thought wasn’t lively enough. That topic can’t be properly addressed in ten or fifteen minutes, and anyway I lack the technical background to be asking those kinds of questions.

The key point I want to get across was that the purpose of this film was to introduce Vas to a general audience, broader than just the Rybkaforum. I had originally intended that this be put on Chessbase and Convekta, but in the course of editing I realized this production was too long and lacking in hard substance and controversy for a Chessbase audience, but might be perfect for Convekta and this forum. Thus the first half-hour or so is a recap of Vas’s life before Rybka and the history of Rybka. I felt it was important to get to know him as a human being and get a sense of his life journey. The second half deals with the present and future. It was never my intention to come after Vas with hostile questions or to interrogate him aggressively; I knew beforehand that he would be evasive on a lot of stuff (a lot of decisions simply haven’t been made yet) but I think I did get some new information and most of all we get a sense of how he thinks and how he reacts to questions. I know a lot of you know the Rybka story intimately already and will learn little from that part of the interview, but think of the broader audience as I did and you’ll see why I decided to ask those questions.

As with any production there are things you wish you could have asked. In this case I was a little bit surprised by some of his answers on the Internet version; on the day of the interview I really didn’t have a clear picture of how it all fit together and I didn’t realize how much he was de-emphasizing Rybka 4. This resulted in my asking some questions completely on the fly and, well, judge for yourself.

Some may say this was a Rybka propaganda piece. I don’t see it that way. I am a Rybka user and I admire Vas’s chess programming achievements. Of course I am a fan. Nonetheless I have issues with the Internet version, as many of you do. But what positive good would have been served by my going into a long explanation of my gripes and concerns? I wasn’t the star of this interview; I would be abusing my audience if I started ranting and arguing. You cannot speak to Vas directly and come away thinking he’s a bad guy. You do come away thinking that he’s a good guy who is making difficult business decisions based on shifting circumstances and opportunities. I guess we will all see how these decisions play out in the next year or two.

Download interview

From ChessOK, from MegaUpload

Discussion

@RybkaForum: http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=14546

• Aquarium 2010 (version 4.0.2) update has been released just recently. Download — 7.5mb.
• German language pack for Aquarium 2010 is released. Download
• Rybka Opening book by Jeroen Noomen has been updated to run in Aquarium 2010 package. In case of any problems you need to redownload and reinstall the updated version of the book. You can download the updated book from there using your serial key.
• Peshka training interface has been updated fixing a couple of bugs and allowing course updates. You can download the updated interface from there. After downloading reinstall Peshka.

Read below for more information about updates.

What’s new in Aquarium 4.0.2

(also available in the Aquarium FAQ)

Features
* ‘Go to game number’ menu item in the games list
* IDeA Presentation options allow to customize some IDeA behaviour
* IDeA warns you if you start it with more than one active project (this warning can be switched off in the Presentation options)
* Changed the root node list dialog: description and tree score columns are added

Bugfixes
* Fixed inability to launch a search from the game view
* Opening commentary now works
* ‘Preferred side’ is not reset upon pressing ‘Apply changes’
* Some fixes to CBH reading and converting
* Fixed the ‘IDeA options’ dialog OK button not doing anything
* Default layouts for IDeA Control Center and IDeA Project View now exist
* IDeA: Fixed the excess task adding when searching for alternatives in the root node
* Changed the column name in IDeA engine list from ‘#’ to ‘Count’
* Fixed inability to start the engine when it takes too long to load TB
* Fixed inability of 4.0.1 version to access TB on ChessOk server.

How to install German patch for Aquarium

1. Download the following file (it works for all types of Aquarium 2010 packages)
   http://www.chessok.com/download/Aquarium/LangPack_4_02_GER.zip
2. Unpack files into Aquarium 2010 program folder.
3. Note that language pack is valid only for Aquarium 2010 (version 4.02: http://www.chessok.com/download/Aquarium/Aquarium402Full.exe).

It is supposed that additional work for improving the translation will be done in the future.

German documentation can be download from here: DOC, PDF

We are glad to inform you, that Chess Assistant 10 Mega package is now available for a price of Chess Assistant 10 Professional, which amounts to a $80 discount!

Mega Package includes Chess Assistant 10 Professional and Gold Nalimov Tablebases on 12 DVD, so essentially you get these DVDs for free.

— Chess Assistant 10 Mega & Gold Nalimov Tablebases for download $149 / €119.20
— Chess Assistant 10 Mega & Gold Nalimov Tablebases on DVD $159 / €127.20

Note: even for download version Nalimov Tablebases are sent by post on 12*8.5GB DVD (100GB of data).

London Chess Classic will be held London, Great Britain from December 8th to 15th December.

Participants include: Magnus Carlsen (ELO 2801), Vladimir Kramnik (ELO 2772), Hikaru Nakamura (ELO 2715), Nigel Short (ELO 2707), Michael Adams (ELO 2698), Ni Hua, Luke McShane and David Howell.

Average ELO: 2697.
Time control: 2 hour for 40 moves + 1 hour to 20 moves + 15 min and 30 sec/move.
Free day: December 11th.
All rounds except for the last start at 14.00 GMT. Last round starts at 12.00 GMT

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka Aquarium commentary.

Carlsen (2801) (NOR) brKramnik (2772) (RUS) brNakamura (2715) (USA) brShort (2707) (GBR) brAdams (2698) (GBR) brNi Hua (2665) (CHN) brMcShane (2615) (GBR) brHowell (2597) (GBR)

Round 1 LIVE!

One of the biggest changes in Rybka Aquarium 2010 is the greatly improved Interactive Deep Analysis (IDeA). Many players were happy with the possibilities offered by IDeA in Rybka 3 Aquarium, but I’m afraid that it will look like a dinosaur compared to the new version. It provides better automatic analysis and much more effective ways to control the analysis process and the shape of the analysis tree. I’m sure that many serious players will find that the new and improved IDeA is an essential tool to stay competitive.

The differences of ChessOK Aquarium 2010 compared to (Deep)Rybka Aquarium 2010+:

1) There is no Rybka 3. Instead it comes with Rybka 2.3.2a. If you already own Rybka 3 you may link and use it.

2) No Chess Assistant 10 bonus.

3) Costs less:
— ChessOK Aquarium for download — $39.95/€31.96.
— Upgrade version for Rybka 3 Aquarium customers — $29.95/€23.96.

New Products are available for sale at our online shop:

The long awaited CT ART 4.0, which is a indispensable training tool for intermediate players. The new version sports a convenient user interface and adds 1,000 training exercises (2,200 basic exercises and 1,800 auxiliary exercises altogether)

• CT ART 4.0 for download — $25/€20
• CT ART 4.0 on DVD — $32/€25.60

There are also upgrade versions (from CT-ART 3.0) available:

• for download — $18/€14.40;
• on DVD — $19.95/€15.96;

Elementary Checkmates I & II which are mainly aimed for beginners who do not want to miss 1 move mate, but also would be useful as exercises for more experienced players:

• Checkmates I for download — $25/€20
• Checkmates I on DVD — $32/€25.60
• Checkmates II for download — $25/€20
• Checkmates II on DVD — $32/€25.60

In view of the changes in Rybka author Vasik Rajlich’s plans about the date of Rybka 4’s launching (read his message here) our plans concerning the Rybka Aquarium 2010+ package respectively have also been altered!

Customers who have already ordered Rybka Aquarium 2010+ in accordance with our previous announcement can either get their money back or receive a new Rybka Aquarium 2010+ kit.
We are trying to include into Rybka Aquarium 2010+ the best possible substitution of the Rybka 4 engine.

1) Now Rybka Aquarium 2010+ / Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010+ will include Rybka 3/Deep Rybka 3.

2) Super Bonus. Instead of a right for a free upgrade to Rybka 4 / Deep Rybka 4 you will get a free copy of a professional chess database program Chess Assistant 10 along with Aquarium 2010+!

Every buyer of the Rybka Aquarium 2010+ package gets a bonus of Chess Assistant 10 starter package, and a buyer of Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010+ gets Chess Assistant 10 Professional package. For the DVD-version of Rybka Aquarium 2010+ the Chess Assistant will be delivered on an additional CD enclosed into a box.

This offer presents a unique opportunity to buy those two programs at the lowest possible price.

FIDE’s World Cup will take place in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia from Nov 21st to Dec 15th.
Number of players: 128.
The most rated players: Gelfand (2758), Gashimov (2758), Svidler (2754), Morozevich (2750), Radjabov (2748), Ivanchuk (2739), Ponomariov (2739), Grischuk (2738), Jakovenko (2736), Wang Yue (2734), Eljanov (2728), Karjakin (2723), Mamedyarov (2719), Shirov (2719), Dominguez (2719), Movsesian (2718), Vachier-Lagrave (2718), Alekseev (2715), Tomashevsky (2708), Wang Hao (2708) etc.
Tournament format: K.O..
Time control: 90 min + 30 sec/move for 40 moves, then 30 extra minutes.
Free day:9th December.

1st round: 21-23 November.

All rounds start at 10.00 GMT.

ChessOK is going to broadcast the most interesting games of this event.

Part One Graphical Annotations Visual annotations are an effective tool to recall your thoughts about a position and quickly remind you of its most important features. They are also essential for creating video lectures and very useful for live commentary. Open (or create) a game and click “Color Marks” on the “Comments” tab.

The graphical annotation palette is displayed as a floating window that you can drag anywhere on the screen and it stays open until you close it. It gives you quick access to a variety of graphics for annotating a position as shown in the image below.
	The graphical annotation palette.

You can move back and forth in the notation and annotate a full game without closing the palette. You can even keep it open while adding other types of annotations or new variations to the notation. If you want to use the mouse to make a move on the board, make sure that the leftmost icon (the mouse pointer) is selected. The graphic below shows the shapes that can be drawn on the chessboard. Each shape is available in four different colors: red, green, blue, and yellow. Three of the shapes (the ‘X’, the rectangle and the circle) can be drawn on a single square; the arrows (straight and curved) can be drawn between any two squares and the filled rectangle can be drawn over any rectangular area on the board.

The graphical annotation shapes.

The currently selected shape is highlighted in the palette. In the example shown in the image, the straight blue arrow is selected.
	The blue arrow is selected.

If you want to draw a particular shape and color, start by selecting it from the palette. If it is an ‘X,’ a rectangle or a circle, click the square where you want to draw the shape. An arrow is drawn by pressing and holding the left mouse button while dragging the mouse from one square to another. Holding the Shift key down while drawing a straight arrow draws a dashed arrow. For a filled rectangle shape, hold down the left mouse button while dragging the mouse across the board between opposite corners of the rectangle you want to draw. You will notice that at the bottom of the drop-down list for each shape, there is an eraser icon. Clicking it erases all shapes of that type from the board. There are also two other options for deleting shapes.

Delete shapes.

The eraser icon on the palette allows you to delete shapes by clicking their endpoints and the broom removes all visual annotations from the current position. “More options…” offers further options for graphical annotations.

“Copy to Clipboard” copies the graphical annotations to the clipboard. We discussed in last month’s column how they can be used in iBooks. “Paste from Clipboard” displays the graphical annotations on the chessboard. The graphical annotations we have looked at so far can be used on the fly, e.g., for a live annotation of a game. “Additional Markers” offer even more options, such as displaying text on the board, but are more suitable for preparing annotations beforehand. The following diagram illustrates some of the features available in the “Additional markers”.

“Additional markers” annotations.

If you want to see further examples of graphical annotations in Aquarium, I recommend that you have a look at the excellent chess videos made by jrobichess.

Copy Board Image Besides copying games in PGN format and positions in EPD format, Aquarium let’s you copy a graphic image of the board with all visual annotations.
	Copy board image with graphics.

Clicking “Board Image” on the “Home –View” tab copies the current board image. After that you can paste it into a word processor, a graphics program or any other program that accepts graphics. This allows you to prepare diagrams for your documents, your website, etc. The diagram below was copied using this method and pasted into Microsoft Word. The image is a copy of what you see on your Aquarium screen, including the board and piece themes, graphical annotations, etc.

Copied board image with graphics.

Aquarium allows you to set the exact size of the captured image – a feature welcomed by many authors. The advantage is that it will fit exactly into your design or that required by the publisher. In other words, the captured image is ready for publishing.

To display the “Save Board Image Options” right-click over the board and select “Board Image Options” as shown in the screenshot above. When copying board images the “Size” parameter is the only one that matters. In this case it has been set to 242, which means that Aquarium will automatically create board images that are 242 x 242 pixels, regardless of the size of the board as displayed in Aquarium itself.

Set the size of the copied image.

Animations for the Web

You may have noticed the “Create Animation” button in the image above. Well, Aquarium can create animations based on captured board images. You can publish these animations on your blog, just like normal images.

Start by opening up the “Save Board Image Options” as shown above. Here you can select where your images will be saved (“Path”) and the size of the images. You should save your images to an empty directory, since “Create Animation” will include all images in the specified directory to create the animation. Now that everything is set up, you can start saving board images that you want to include in the animation. Note that also here the board images are saved with visual annotations. When you are ready to save the first position, right click over the board and select “Save board image” from the menu as shown in the following screenshot.

	Do the same for every board image you want to save. When you are done, you can create the animation; right-click over the board and select “Board Image Options.” The “Save Board Image Options” dialog we saw above will be displayed. This time click “Create Animations” to bring up the “Create GIF Animation” dialog box.
Create an animation.

Here you must make sure that “Source folder” points to the directory where you saved the board images. The resulting animation will be stored in the file specified in the “Destination file.” That is also the file you would display in your blog. The “Delay time” decides how fast the animation runs. The unit is milliseconds, so a delay time of 1500 as shown in this example will display each image in the animation for 1.5 seconds. Note that if you want to display some of the positions longer than the default, you can save the same position more than once. For instance, some users like to display the initial image for a longer duration. The following animation was created using this method.

To see examples of some very interesting animations created with the help of Aquarium, have a look at The Chunky Rook.

Online Tablebases Collecting all multi-piece Nalimov tablebases requires a lot of disk space; therefore, most players either skip the tablebases altogether or only store a fraction of them on their hard disk. Even if you don’t have any tablebases at all, Aquarium can evaluate any position with six or fewer pieces accurately by doing a remote lookup on the ChessOK tablebase server. Here is an example rook endgame with six pieces on the board. This position is from the game Shirov – Leko, Linares 2000. Leko just played 60…Ra1. The game ended in a draw, and many commentators agreed that the rook endgame was drawn. Let’s have Aquarium’s online tablebase evaluate this position.

Is it a draw?.

All I need to do is click the “TB6 Online” button on the “Analysis” tab and Aquarium returns an optimal variation that is added to the notation as shown below.
	Online endgame lookup.

The variation inserted by Aquarium shows that Shirov could have won with 61.Rg3! instead of 61.Kf4, which leads to a draw as a second “TB6 Online” lookup would confirm. The exclamation mark (!) after a move in the tablebase variation means that this move is the only one that preserves the win. There are five such moves in the variation that ends with a checkmate after forty-three moves, so it is by no means trivial. The online tablebases can be of great help when you are analyzing endgames.

Shirov missed a win!.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are one of those little known, but very useful features of Aquarium. They allow you to bookmark one or more positions within a game and quickly jump between the marked positions. Aquarium actually gives you a choice of two types of bookmarks and they are switched on/off with the ‘M’ and ‘P’ keyboard shortcuts (or the right-click menu):

• M allows you to define one bookmark and colors the corresponding move red in the notation (so it is different from coloring a tree move red). If you press ‘M’ again in another position in the game, that move becomes bookmarked and the bookmark is removed from the previous move. If you accidentally bookmark a move, you can remove the bookmark by pressing ‘M’ again (without moving the cursor).
• P allows you to define multiple bookmarks and the bookmarked moves are colored blue. If you bookmark a move and move to a different position and press ‘P’ again, you will have two bookmarked moves. If the current move is bookmarked, you can press ‘P’ to remove the bookmark.

Here is an example showing four bookmarked moves, three blue (10.a4, 10…b6, and 13.e4) and one red (11.Bd3). You can cycle between the blue bookmarked moves by using the Shift+P keyboard shortcut (or the right-click menu), making it easy to locate them even in long, heavily annotated games. Pressing Shift+M jumps to the red bookmark.
	Two types of bookmarks.

Open Game at Bookmarked Position Once you start using bookmarks you will probably want to know whether a game that you open has any bookmarked positions or not; I will show how you can change the red bookmark, so that Aquarium opens games at the bookmarked position if there is one. Open a game and bookmark one of the moves by pressing “M.” Open the “Managing styles” dialog box with the Shift+S keyboard shortcut. Make sure that “Temporary bookmark” is highlighted in the “Styles for current move” list, as shown is this example, and then click the “Edit styles” button. The “Edit special styles” dialog box will be shown.

All you need to do here is select “Set position” and then click OK to close the dialog boxes. You have changed the “Temporary bookmark,” so that Aquarium will open games at the bookmarked move. You can follow the same procedure for the blue bookmarks.

Move Classes and Styles As you may have guessed when looking at the dialog boxes above, bookmarks are a special case of a more general concept supported by Aquarium: Move classes. Move classes can be used for a variety of purposes. They can be assigned both by users (such as the bookmarks described above) and by Aquarium itself (e.g., when inserting analyzed variations). There are thirty-two move classes available and you can apply different styles to them, such as foreground and background color, different fonts, font properties, etc. The classes come with preset styles, but you can change them in the “Edit special styles” dialog box shown above. If you want to assign a class to a move, open the “Managing styles” dialog box with the Shift+S keyboard shortcut and select one or more classes for the move. The image below shows a partial list of the available classes.

Move classes.

In this example we have assigned two classes to the current move: “Temporary bookmark” and “Novelty.” The “Current style” pane shows what the currently highlighted class looks like and the “Final style” shows what the move will actually look like in the notation with all the assigned classes.

Game Classes You can also assign classes to whole games. Game classes have no connection with move classes (unlike in Chess Assistant). Game classes are assigned in the game list and are displayed in the “Flags” column. Each of the eight small squares represents one class. They are “My own game”, “Historic game”, “Model game”, “Annotated game from a book”, “Computer game”, “Opening theory/plans”, “Middlegame”, and “Endgame”.

Game classes.

As shown in the image above, the name of a class is displayed when you hover over it with the mouse pointer. Clicking the class assigns it to the game. Clicking again turns it off. If you have been examining an interesting game and want to find all games belonging to the same game classes, click in the “Flags” column of the game to the right of the classes and then click “Current Cell” in the “Search” group as shown below. In this example we will search for all games belonging to the same classes as game number two; i.e., games belonging to the “Endgame” class.

Copying Game Fragments and Positions Every Aquarium user probably knows that he can copy and paste games with Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Fewer users know that you can also copy the current position in EPD format, the moves up to the current position and the moves following the current position in PGN format. You will see all these options when you right-click over the notation and look at the “Copy” sub-menu.

Flexible copying of moves and positions.

As you can see, you can even copy all positions in the game as a set of EPD records. What you should notice here are the keyboard shortcuts listed after the options. Using a keyboard is often faster than using the mouse, so it is worth memorizing the shortcuts for these commands. Note that some of these shortcuts may differ depending on your keyboard layout, but you can always see the correct shortcuts by opening this menu.

Copy first moves copies the game up to the current position in PGN format. Copy rest of moves copies the moves following the current position in PGN format. In addition to these options you can actually copy an interval of moves, say moves ten to fifteen, although it is a hidden option that is not available as a menu selection. On a U.S. English keyboard you can use the square brackets to delimit the moves that you want to copy.

Copy a game fragment as PGN.

Here I pressed ‘[‘ before White’s tenth move and ‘]’ after Black’s fifteenth move. I have highlighted the selected moves, but the symbols preceding and following the selection are Aquarium’s way of showing the range of selected moves.

When I press Ctrl+C, Aquarium asks if I want to copy the whole game or just the selected moves.
Here I click “Selection” for copying only the selected moves from the game.

Dadi Jonsson.

A major new version of Rybka Aquarium will soon be released. It’s called Rybka Aquarium 2010 and it will be available before the holidays. This new version includes a free update to Rybka 4 when it is released.

One of the biggest changes in Rybka Aquarium 2010 is the greatly improved Interactive Deep Analysis (IDeA). Many players were happy with the possibilities offered by IDeA in Rybka 3 Aquarium, but I’m afraid that it will look like a dinosaur compared to the new version. It provides better automatic analysis and much more effective ways to control the analysis process and the shape of the analysis tree. I’m sure that many serious players will find that the new and improved IDeA is an essential tool to stay competitive.

Analyzing with many engines. The original IDeA could only use one engine for the analysis, but the new version can split the analysis between many engines. You can, for instance, use four instances of single core Rybka for the analysis on a quad computer, essentially reducing the multiprocessor overhead to zero. It’s like getting one extra core for free compared to running Rybka in 4-CPU mode.

Analyzing on a network of computers. This feature is a dream come true for power users, analysts, and serious players who want to take their analysis to a new level. If you own two computers, you can of course run Aquarium on one of them and use it for the analysis. In the new version you can also add engines running on your other computer to the pool of IDeA analysis engines. Using this method I have tested up to thirty-five engines analyzing simultaneously. The engines were running on various computers, some on my local network while others were located in different countries and connected to my Aquarium over the Internet. IDeA takes care of splitting the analysis between the available engines.

Multiple IDeA projects analyzed in parallel. You can define many analysis projects, each with its own analysis and tree settings. IDeA can analyze any number of those projects in parallel. The status of each project is saved between sessions, so you can manage many different IDeA projects much easier than before.

Multiple analysis “roots” for a single project. The starting position for IDeA analysis is called a “root.” If you are analyzing a position in IDeA when another interesting position shows up in the tree, you can make it a new root, without even stopping the analysis. You can remove the original root or let IDeA analyze from both roots. You can use this feature to focus IDeA on selected positions without restarting it. IDeA can keep a list of all roots that have been used in a project.

Shaping the analysis tree. The former single “variativity” parameter was not very effective and didn’t affect IDeA sufficiently. Now there are a number of new settings that have a significant influence on the shape of the IDeA analysis tree.

• The “Tree width” parameter determines how wide the resulting IDeA tree will be. Although similar to “variativity,” this new parameter is much more effective.
• The maximum length of variations can be defined. This allows you to make the tree denser near the root and avoid very long variations.
• Analysis can be limited to positions within a certain evaluation range. Positions outside the specified range will not be explored further.
• The number of alternatives generated for White/Black can be limited.
• A “preferred side” can be set; e.g., for developing your opening repertoire.
• A list of “thematic moves” can be given. You can use them to ensure that certain moves are always analyzed. For instance, in an attacking game you might want to make sure that the moves Bxh7+ and Ng5 are considered.
• “False alarm check” immediately performs additional analysis of new moves that look “too good to be true,” preventing IDeA from spending more time on them if they turn out to be worse than they first looked.

All of these settings can be changed on the fly during the IDeA session, further emphasizing that IDeA is designed to be used as an interactive tool.

Move repetition detection. IDeA tasks no longer consist of a single position, but a full line that leads from the root node to the position to be analyzed. This enables Rybka to report 0.00 scores for twofold repetitions, and is generally more correct. This also leads to the fifty-move rule being observed.

Automatic backup of analysis trees. Besides more robust tree handling in IDeA, the analysis trees are now automatically backed up. Not only does it prevent data loss, but it may also prove useful in some other cases too.

Browsing the analysis queue. You can see a list of all tasks for the current stage; which tasks were automatically scheduled by IDeA and which ones you added manually. The corresponding positions can be displayed on the board and you can see the engine’s output for the selected task, prioritize the tasks, and delete unnecessary ones. If there are tasks waiting in the queue when you stop the analysis, they will be stored and processed the next time you start the analysis, even if you restart Aquarium.

We are pleased to announce the release of our new product – Rybka Aquarium 2010 / Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010 – which will be available for pre-ordering from November 18, 2009. The product will be released on:

  • November 30, 2009 (download version);
  • December 1, 2009 (DVD-version).

The purchase of Rybka Aquarium 2010 / Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010 includes:

1) Rybka 2.3.2a and a FREE UPGRADE to Rybka 4 Aquarium / Deep Rybka 4 Aquarium (includes Rybka 4 / Deep Rybka 4 chess engines), which will be released at the same time as Rybka 4:

1. Customers buying Rybka Aquarium 2010 / Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010 download versions will get a FREE download version of Rybka 4 Aquarium / Deep Rybka 4 Aquarium through the Internet;
2. customers buying the DVD-version of Rybka Aquarium 2010 / Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010 will get their DVD with Rybka 4 Aquarium / Deep Rybka 4 Aquarium by mail (postage will be paid by Convekta Ltd);

2) Free online access to the very latest Internet Rybka running on fast, remote servers (from December, 26, 2009 till January, 31, 2010. Initial service will be available to Aquarium customers before the general release of Rybka 4, based on pre-release versions of Rybka 4) as defined here:

1. Rybka Aquarium 2010 includes Internet Rybka remote access start pack worth 5 | (estimated more than 13 hours of online access, using 1 logical server thread).
2. Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010 includes Internet Rybka remote access start pack worth 10 | (estimated more than 26 hours of online access, using 1 logical server thread).

Note that the Rybka 4 engines that are included with (Deep) Rybka 4 Aquarium can be also used in other chess programs, like Chessbase, Chess Assistant and Fritz.
If you already have any Rybka 3 on your computer or other UCI engines by your desire Rybka Aquarium 2010 automatically will find them and add to the list of the engines.

Rybka Aquarium 2010 / Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010: a short description

Rybka 2.3.2a combined with Aquarium 2010, a new and modern user interface.

• Analyze and annotate your games with Aquarium’s advanced analysis methods.
• Databases with fast searches
• Powerful and fast chess trees
• Play against the computer
• Publish your chess text: Print, word processor or web
• Free internet chess server access for playing against chess players all over the world
• Online access to Rybka 4 on a remote server
• Database: 4,400,000 games. Lightning fast database searches. Chessbase/Fritz CBH format (reads and converts), Chess Assistant CDP, PGN and EPD databases
• The right to get Rybka 4 Aquarium / Deep Rybka 4 Aquarium, (includes Rybka 4 / Deep Rybka 4 chess engines), which will be released at the same time as Rybka 4
• Full Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit) and Vista compatibility.

Choose Deep Rybka Aquarium 2010 ($124 / 99.2 Euro for DVD version or $119 / 95.2 Euro for download version) for a multiprocessor/multi-core computer and Rybka Aquarium 2010 ($62 / 49.6 Euro for DVD version and $59 / 47.2 Euro for download version) for a single processor computer.

The 4th Memorail of 8th world champion Michael Tal will take place in Moscow from November 4th to 18th.
Number of players: 10.
Average ELO is 2764. It is 21st FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Round robin.
Free day: 9th November

All rounds start at 12.00 GMT.

Carlsen (2801) (NOR) brAnand (2788) (IND) brAronian (2786) (ARM) brKramnik (2772) (RUS) brLeko (2752) (HUN) brGelfand (2758) (ISR) brSvidler (2754) (RUS) brMorozevich (2750) (RUS) brIvanchuk (2739) (UKR) brPonomariov (2739) (UKR)

17th European Team Championship will take place in Novi Sad, Serbia from October 21st to 31st.
Number of teams: 38 - Men Section, 28 - Women Section.
Each team consists of 4 regular and 1 reserve player.
Tournament format: Swiss.
Free days: None

All rounds start at 14.00 GMT. The Final round starts at 12.00 GMT

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of leaders matches with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary

Round 1 LIVE!

The traditional 13th Unive Tournament will take place in Hoogeveen, Nederlands from October 18th to 24th.
Number of players: 4.
Average ELO is 2663. It is 17th FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Double roundrobin.
Free day: 21st October

All rounds start at 13.00 GMT.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of of main Crown Group with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary

Round 1 LIVE!

Ivanchuk (2756) (UKR) brPolgar (2687) (HUN) brTiviakov (2670) (NED) brGiri (2552) (NED)

Rybka Aquarium 3.2 has been released with several interesting enhancements. Some of them have been described in my recent ChessOK Cafe columns and, as usual, the Aquarium FAQ describes many of the new features. In this column I will show a few examples that should help iBook authors better understand some of the commands available to them. I assume that the reader is familiar with my two previous iBook columns: “Interactive Chess Books in Rybka Aquarium” and “Writing Aquarium iBooks – Introduction”.

Let’s have a quick look at some of the things we have learned so far about iBooks:

• In “Interactive Chess Books in Rybka Aquarium” we saw some examples of what iBooks can look like from the reader’s perspective. We saw iBook excerpts from a tournament report, game analysis, a middlegame book and an endgame magazine.
• How potential errors in chess notation are automatically prevented in iBooks.
• How a table of contents can be added where the author makes the final decision about the order in which the content of the book is presented.
• How the creative writer has much more freedom in presenting his analysis than he is used to with traditional game analysis.
• In “Writing Aquarium iBooks – Introduction” we learned how to create a new iBook and how to open iBooks.
• The purpose of the various buttons, menus and options available to iBook writers.
• How you can format text in iBooks: Headings, bold and italic text.
• How you can easily convert moves in simple text format to live, clickable moves that display the corresponding position on the chessboard.
• How you can automatically convert a fully annotated chess game into iBook format with the click of a button.
• How authors can protect their commercial work from being modified, printed or exported.

Even though we have covered a lot of ground, there are many useful features that haven’t been mentioned yet. Some of them are covered in the following iBook examples.

I assume that you have already created a new iBook as was explained in “Writing Aquarium iBooks – Introduction.” After that click the “Edit Page” button on the ribbon and you are ready to follow the instructions below.

Exercises

There are many published collections of training positions, tactical and positional exercises, endgame studies, etc. You can use iBooks for such collections and present them in many different ways, depending on your requirements:

1. Attach the iBook to a database of your own games and collect important positions from them into the iBook. There could be chapters titled “Tactical Mistakes,” “Opening Mistakes,” “Strategic Mistakes,” or on a more positive note “Winning Combinations,” etc. Reviewing and updating the iBook once in a while makes sure that you learn from your own mistakes and don’t forget the techniques you have already mastered.
2. Endgame studies would show a diagram, immediately followed by the solution.
3. Training exercises might have pages with diagrams and links to another page with the solutions. This would be a typical setup for a printed book, but iBooks also allow you to add a link below the diagram that shows the solution there when it’s clicked.

I will take one very simple example to illustrate these different ways of presenting exercises, studies, etc. in an iBook. As always, you have a choice of entering the moves into the book in text format or pick them up from a game in the iBook database. I will start be using the text format, but after that I’ll show that it’s even easier to get the moves from a database. Our example position comes from a game that was played some years ago. White can win material based on the weakness of f7, using discovered attack involving pin-breaking. Here is the game: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bc4 Bg4 4.Nc3 c5. Here White played 5.Nxe5 Bxd1 (Black could have played on a pawn down after 5…dxe5 6.Qxg4) 6.Bxf7+ Ke7 7.Nd5#

White to move.

Method 1: Solution not hidden

For our first example, copy the game from the paragraph above and paste it into an empty page in your iBook, using the Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut. Then use the “1.e4” menu in the “Page text edit” window to convert the mainline and the variation into clickable moves as was explained in “Writing Aquarium iBooks – Introduction” (see the “Variations” section). After that you can preview the iBook by saving the text (click the button with the green check mark symbol). When you click the moves in the “Page text” window the corresponding position will be displayed on the chessboard.

At this point, the text in the edit window should look like this: [line(1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bc4 Bg4 4.Nc3 c5,0)]. Here White played [line(5.Nxe5 Bxd1,0)] (Black could have played on a pawn down after [line(5...dxe5 6.Qxg4,1)]) [line(6.Bxf7+ Ke7 7.Nd5#,0)] As you can see, only one command, “line,” is needed to create this example. It takes a sequence of moves and a second parameter which is either 0 (mainline) or 1 (variation) and converts them to links that display the corresponding position when they are clicked. Next we want to add a diagram after the first move sequence, so add a double line break before “Here White played…”. Place the cursor in the empty line and select “Diagram for current position” from the “Other options” menu as shown in the following image.

Insert diagram.

Aquarium automatically figures out the correct position, based on where you place the diagram in the notation, so this is really easy. The resulting iBook page looks as shown below. When you click the moves, which are shown in blue color, the main board will display the corresponding position. Note that the diagram shown in the iBook itself is just like a diagram in a book and is not updated.
	Diagram with solution.

Method 2: Solution on a different page

We can use this same example to create an exercise, where the diagram is displayed without the solution. When the reader has tried to solve the exercise, he can click a link to see the solution. We will display the exercise on one page and the solution on another page, similar to printed books that have all the solutions collected at the end of the book.

Start by creating a new page for the exercise. When creating the page you can choose a page title. Call it “Exercise” if you like. The content of this page will be the first part from our previous page, plus a link that jumps to the page with the solution. Copy the following lines to your new page.

[line(1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bc4 Bg4 4.Nc3 c5,0)]{d}
White to move. Find the best continuation.
[“open_page(1),”Show me the solution!]

I have added some explanatory text after the “line” command and then a new command then you haven’t seen before: “open_page.” This command jumps to the page specified in the parenthesis, page number 1 in this case. Just like other iBook commands it is enclosed in square brackets; the command itself is in quotes, followed by a comma and the link text.

	When using the open_page command the first question is how do we know the number of the page we want to jump to? There are three different ways you can see the page number. As shown here, the number of the current page is always displayed in the title bar. You can also get a list of all pages in the book by clicking the “Page List” button. The page numbers are displayed in the ID column.
Page numbers.

A third method is available when you are editing a page. Then you can click the “Page options” button and the page number is displayed in the PageID field as shown in the next screenshot. Note that it’s called PageID and not simply page number. The reason is that these numbers are different from traditional page numbers. An author who writes an iBook can write the pages (or chapters) in any order he likes. When he is ready to publish his work he can rearrange the pages any way he likes by using a classifier (which corresponds to a table of contents). There is no need to change anything in the book itself. This flexibility is invaluable for authors of bigger iBooks.

Page ID in page options.

You may have noticed that the open_page command is not available in the iBook menu system so you have to type it. The iBook menu system can be modified by the user and authors can use that flexibility to add commands, text snippets, etc. to the menu system. This can considerably speed up the writing of chess books, where certain structures are repeated throughout the book. Let’s see how we can add the open_page command to a menu.

Define new menu items.

Clicking “Edit Templates” opens a dialog box where you can add new items to this menu and define what they do. Here I have clicked the “Add” button and given the template a name. This is the text that will be displayed on the menu. After entering the text and clicking OK, I can enter the definition of what this new item will do.

The “Jump to page” item is highlighted in the left pane and in the right pane I have entered this definition of the command: [“open_page(:cursor:),”] This is just the command itself, but the keyword “:cursor:” defines where the cursor will be placed after the text is added to the book. Here it will be placed where I must enter the page number, so immediately after selecting “Jump to page” from the menu I can enter the number of the page to jump to (1 in our example above). After that I place the cursor before the right bracket and enter the link text that will be displayed (“Show me the solution!” in the example).

Define the “Jump to page” command.

After adding the open_page command to our new page, it will display as shown here. After the reader has studied the position and made up his mind about the best continuation he can click the solution link. The way we implemented this, he will be taken to the first page we created where the full solution is shown. He can play through the moves and study the solution. When he is done he can click the “Back” button to return to the page with the exercise(s). Another option is to let the solution page have a link to the page with the next exercise.

An exercise. Hidden solution.

Method 3: Solution gradually revealed

Sometimes it is more convenient to view the solution without jumping between pages. Our next example shows a simple way of doing that and at the same time gradually revealing the complete solution. The only thing that needs to be changed is how the solution link works. Start by creating a new iBook page and copying and pasting the following text into it. The first two lines are the same as in the previous example, and the two other lines contain the moves of the solution.

[line(1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bc4 Bg4 4.Nc3 c5,0)]{d}
White to move. Find the best continuation.
5.Nxe5 Bxd1{?!} 6.Bxf7+ Ke7 7.Nd5#
5…dxe5 6.Qxg4

After pasting this text into the new iBook page, highlight the mainline (the third line in the text) with your mouse and select “set line: style 0” from the “1.e4” menu. This encloses the mainline in a set_line command, which only defines the mainline, but doesn’t display it. Next highlight the line with the 5…dxe5 variation with your mouse and this time select “set line: style 1” from the “1.e4” menu. Style “1” means that this will become a variation.

Finally, we need to add two commands to display the mainline and the variation. We use the “jump” command to do that. It jumps to the specified move number in the current line and displays the moves in the game window. An example is jump(5), which jumps to the position after White’s fifth move. A special case is jump($), which jumps to the end of the line. We need one jump command after the mainline and another one after the 5…dxe5 variation. The final version looks like this:

[line(1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bc4 Bg4 4.Nc3 c5,0)]{d}
White to move. Find the best continuation.
[set_line(5.Nxe5 Bxd1{?!} 6.Bxf7+ Ke7 7.Nd5#,0)]
[“jump($),”Show me the mainline]
[set_line(5...dxe5 6.Qxg4,1)]
[“jump($),”Show me a better defense for Black]

The image below shows how the exercise is presented to the user. Here you can see the two links below the diagram. When the iBook is displayed, the game window is empty. After you study the position in the diagram you can click the first link to reveal the mainline. When you think you have found a better defense for Black you can click the second link. In this way you can gradually reveal the solution to an exercise instead of showing all variations at the same time.

Solution shown in game window.

Method 4: Using the database

This brings us to the most flexible way of dealing with exercises in iBooks. Instead of having all the variations and commentary as text in your iBook edit window, you can store them as an annotated game in the iBook database.

Open the database connected to your iBook. It has the same name as the iBook, but a DSN extension instead of AHB. Paste the following game into the database and save it.

[Event “Vila de Padron op 1st”]
[Date “2000.09.01”]
[White “Conde Rodriguez, J Miguel”]
[Black “Munoz Palmerin, Juan Carlos”]
[Result “1-0”]
[WhiteELO “0”]
[BlackELO “2206”]

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bc4 Bg4 4. Nc3 c5 5. Nxe5 Bxd1 (5… dxe5 6. Qxg4) 6. Bxf7+ Ke7 7. Nd5# 1-0

I assume that this is the first game that you add to the database. Switch back to the iBook and create a new page. We begin by selecting the game from the database. Open the “1.e4” menu and click main_game:

[main_game(1)]

You must type the number in the parenthesis, which refers to the game number in the database. In this case we want to work with the first game in the database, which should be the game shown above. Next we want to display the first four moves from the game and insert a diagram. Select “write_line” from the “1.e4” menu. You need to specify the first and the last move that are to be written. We want to start with White’s first move (1.) and end with Black’s fourth move (4…):

[write_line(1.,4...)]

Next insert a diagram in the same way as was explained before (Other options > Diagram for current position).

{d}

Finally add the following command to load the database game into the game window:

[“load_game(1),” Show me the solution!]

We’re done! This is all that is needed:

[main_game(1)]
[write_line(1.,4...)]{d}
[“load_game(1),” Show me the solution!]

As you see it’s simpler than some of the solutions we looked at above. There is no jumping between pages and all the moves are picked up from the database game instead of being a part of the iBook itself. One big advantage of this method is that it works equally well regardless of how complicated the game and the annotations are. If you change the game in the database, for instance, by adding verbal commentary, it will be reflected in the iBook.

Solution displayed from database.

Starting From a Non-Standard Position In our examples above we used a complete game, starting from the normal initial position. In many cases we only have a position, such as an endgame position, but no record of how that position was reached. This situation is easily handled by iBooks. The main difference is that you must start by specifying the starting position with a FEN/EDP string. We’ll use this study by Reti as an example. The EPD string for this position looks like this: 8/6p1/k1P2p1p/7K/8/8/8/8 w - - Create a new iBook page for this study. The command to define the starting position is set_start_position: [set_start_position(8/6p1/k1P2p1p/7K/8/8/8/8 w - -)] {d}

Endgame study by Reti.

Here we have defined the position above and added a diagram showing the position. If we only want to show the solution itself, we could add:

[line(1.Kg6 Kb6 2.Kxg7 f5 3.Kf6{!} f4 4.Ke5 f3 5.Kd6 f2 6.c7 f1=Q 7.c8=Q Qf4+ 8.Kd5{=},0)]

We could also turn this into an exercise where reader must click a link to display the solution. It requires commands that are already familiar to us from previous examples:

[set_start_position(8/6p1/k1P2p1p/7K/8/8/8/8 w - -)]
{d}
[set_line(1.Kg6 Kb6 2.Kxg7 f5 3.Kf6{!} f4 4.Ke5 f3 5.Kd6 f2 6.c7 f1=Q 7.c8=Q Qf4+ 8.Kd5{=},0)]
[“jump($),”Show me the solution!]

It’s even easier if you have the study in your database. Create a new game in your iBook database, paste the following game into it and save it:

[FEN “8/6p1/k1P2p1p/7K/8/8/8/8 w - - 0 1”]
[SetUp “1”]

1. Kg6 Kb6 2. Kxg7 f5 3. Kf6 f4 4. Ke5 f3 5. Kd6 f2 6. c7 f1=Q 7. c8=Q Qf4+ 8. Kd5 {=} *

Since this is the second game we add to the database we can refer to it in our iBook as game number 2, but you can always see the id of an open game in the title bar of the Aquarium window. Now switch back to the iBook. Using the methods described earlier we add the following commands to the edit window:

[main_game(2)]{d}
[“load_game(2),” Show me the solution!]

When the reader clicks the link, the solution is displayed in the game window.

“Hidden” Moves When writing an iBook, you may choose not to mention certain moves that are not central to an idea that you are explaining. Here is an example. The author is explaining a threat that will materialize after 1.Nc6 depending on Black’s reply, but no such reply is displayed in the book. Instead the author gives a variation starting with 2.Qxh7. However, many readers might want to play through a typical variation from beginning to end. The author can allow that by using a set_line command, which contains the missing move. You can see the whole page in the iBook I link to at the end of this column, but here is the part that deals with the “hidden” move: [line(1. Nc6 $1,0)] In view of the threat [set_line(1...Bxc6)] [line(2. Qxh7+ Kxh7 3. Rh4#)] Black is

Where is Black’s first move?.

	Here we see that the hidden move is 1…Bxc6, so when you click, for instance, 3.Rh4# the following variation will be displayed in the game window. Here you see a full variation, which the user can play through to better understand the author’s explanation.
Black’s first move revealed.

Graphical Annotations

Besides plain diagrams, you can also add diagrams with graphical annotations to your iBooks. First add the diagram to your iBook page. This time select the “Diagram” option from the “Other options” menu in the edit window. This inserts the command “{d:}.” Add the FEN/EPD string for the position after the colon and follow it by a semicolon.

Open the game (either using the Sandbox or the database) and locate the position on the diagram. Select the “Comment” tab on the ribbon and click the “Color Marks” button to open the annotation palette. I will not go into the details of how to add graphical annotations to the position, but I think the annotation palette is fairly easy to use. When you are finished with annotating the position, select „Copy to Clipboard” from the „More options…” menu as shown in the image.

Copy graphical annotations.

Now you can switch back to the iBook and locate the diagram. Place the cursor before the right curly bracket (after the semicolon you added earlier) and then paste the graphics annotations using the Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut. The result should look something like this: {d:5rk1/5ppp/8/5PQ1/8/8/8/8 w - -;X SNAg700} As you can see the graphic annotation string is rather cryptic, but it does its job! You can see examples of what the results look like on the “Graphical markers” page in the iBook that you can download at the end of this column. In the following example you can see diagrams with graphical annotations. You can see that here the author has chosen to display only part of the board. You can do that by specifying the lower-left and upper-right corner squares of the rectangle that should be displayed. This can only be done if you specify the EPD string for the position in the diagram command: {d:5rk1/5ppp/8/5PQ1/8/8/8/8 w - -;;e5-h8} This example would display the part of the board that you can see in the example above.

Diagrams with graphics.

iBook Examples Download

You can download the iBook with the examples in this column here. Save the downloaded ZIP-file into the ABases subdirectory of your Aquarium directory and extract the files. After that you can open the iBook (iBookExamples.ahb) in Aquarium.

Dadi Jonsson.

The new cycle of FIDE Grand Prix tournaments will start in Nanjing, China from September 27th to October 9th.
Number of players: 6.
Average ELO is 2764. It is 21st FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Double roundrobin.
Free days: 3rd and 7th October

All rounds start at 08.00 GMT. The Final round starts at 03.00 GMT

Round 1 LIVE!

Carslen - Leko 1-0 brTopalov - Jakovenko 1/2 brWang Yue - Radjabov 1/2 Topalov (2813) (BUL) brCarslen (2772) (NOR) brLeko (2762) (HUN) brRadjabov (2757) (AZE) brJakovenko (2742) (RUS) brWang Yue (2736) (CHN)

12th and 13th World Champions Anatoly Karpov (2619) and Garry Kasparov (2812) will play match in Valencia, Spain from 21st to 24th September.
Match format: 12 (4 Rapid and 8 blitz) games.
Time control: rapid: 25 min + 5 sec/move, blitz 5 min+2 sec/move.

Games start at 18.00 GMT.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Day 1 LIVE!

[--match--]

Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov renew their chess rivalry in Valencia, Spain, 25 years after their epic battle for the world chess championship. Follow live updates here

6.45pm:
The times are evening up to, A.K. on 8 minutes, G.K. down to 11 now.
Chess ok showing the match too, with an interesting discussion going on below.

6.42pm:
Karpov's equal to it, replying instantly with 18 a4, preventing Black's knight from moving to b5.

This is typical Karpov, constricting his opponent before launching his attack.

6.41pm:

17...Qd7 from Kasparov. That enables his queen's rook to enter the game. I wonder how he is going to deal with Ng3...?

6.40pm:
Kasparov now taking his time:

How much time the players consume is usually a good barometer of how they feel about the position, so Garry clearly believes that Anatoly's attack is serious enough...

6.40pm:

This is an excellent move, creating a nice square for the knight to come to g3 and then maybe to e4. Karpov is brewing a nice kingside and central attack.

6.37pm:

This game is following the pattern of many of their previous encounters - Karpov consumes too much time, but often fights back under pressure. Will he do so here? Kasparov often gets too worked up and plays hot-headedly...Another move 17 g4 from Karpov.

Says our man Dan.
Can Kasparov keep a cool head? He's 12 years younger, which he said beforehand would be an advantage, but will his political interests have numbed his killer instinct?

6.33pm:
Dan reckons the time difference could be decisive. Kasparov looking sharper at the moment.
He's been training in Norway against 18-year-old "chess prodigy" Magnus Carlsen.

6.31pm:

16 Rd1 Nc7...Kasparov has blockaded Karpov's advanced pawn, Karpov will look to destroy that blockade and advance, or create pressure against Black's king.

If Karpov were an animal, he'd be a snail. He only has 10 minutes left on the clock. Kasparov has 20 left.

6.29pm:
Dan's back:

We have some more moves: 11..exd5 12 exd5 Nc4 13 b3 Nd6 14 Bf4 b6 15 Qd2 Bb7.

Kasparov is playing fluently and quickly, Karpov more hesitantly, but the position remains finely balanced...

6.27pm:
Karpov still dithering. He's used 7 minutes more than Kasparov now. Currently spent 4 minutes pondering.

6.22pm:
The live board is still working on the official site. It's just the video that's gone.
Karpov white, Kasparov black for this first match.
Karpov has used up nearly 3 minutes more time than the (younger) pretender so far. Dan's unimpressed:

Karpov is pondering over how to recapture the pawn...but he is wasting a lot of time. This is meant to be speed chess!

6.20pm:
Dan saves the day, here's what's gone on so far:

We have the first moves....1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 g3 Bg7 4 Bg2 d5 5 cxd5 Nxd5 6 e4 Nb6 7 Ne2 c5 8 d5 0-0 9 0-0 e6 10 Nc3 Na6 11 h3...it's a very sharp position...Karpov has claimed the centre with his pawns, Kasparov is counter-attacking with pieces. It's just like the old days!

6.18pm:
And they're off. The official site, which never looked particularly robust, has immediately crashed for me.
But here's footage of the press conference.

6.01pm:
Looking through the image gallery of previous Kasparov v Karpov encounters reminds me rather a lot of the Big Train staring sketch.
Possible inspiration? I wish there was the same sort of commentary on the official chess site.

5.57pm:
The questions are coming thick and fast...
"How do they decide who is black and who is white?" asks Penny.
Dan King knows these things, and informs me that it is through a process of chance, sometimes the simple tossing of a coin, but on other occasions a more complex system of drawing a card from a pack.
We still await the arrival of our chess-titans.

5.48pm:
From the rather grainy, and completely soundless video on the Generalitat Valenciana site, we can see that the table is set.
Kasparov's just been out, briefly, swishing theatrically towards the table through a curtain at stage-right.
He sat on his seat, didn't seem happy with a black cushion that was on it, and promptly exited.

5.40pm:
The match starts at 6pm, and you can watch the developments online.
Over four days Kasparov and Karpov will play 12 matches of two different types of speed chess, starting tonight with two "semi-rapid" games.
Dan King, who knows rather more about this than I do, explains how it'll work:

Both players will be given 25 minutes at the start of the game - if they run out of time they will lose, no matter what is happening on the board. But after each move an additional 5 seconds will be added. It means that a player can still hope to win a game even if they run very short of time as with each move they gain a little bit on the clock.

5.24pm:
In 1984, Kasparov and Karpov began a chess match that would last five months without actually producing a clear winner. But don't worry: tonight's contest is a timed affair, so February is safe.
The two grandmasters go head to head from 6pm. Follow all the thrills and spills here, with contributions from, among others, the British chess grandmaster and co-author (with Garry Kasparov) of the book Kasparov Against the World, Dan King.
Emails to adam.gabbatt@guardian.co.uk will be gratefully received.

This month we will examine how you can play against Rybka (or another chess engine) in Aquarium. The Play mode in Aquarium has been revised and streamlined in the upcoming Aquarium 3.2 version. As usual many of the improvements are based on user feedback.

Handicap Play

Besides the option to play against a chess engine at full strength with a rating in the vicinity of 3000 Elo, Aquarium offers a variety of engine handicap methods:

1. Skill handicap. You can choose from three different methods for reducing the strength of the engine.
2. Material handicap ranging from those suitable for the beginner to the grandmaster.
3. Time handicap. Assign a faster time control to the engine than yourself.
4. Depth handicap. Weaken the engine by limiting its search depth.

You can combine these handicap methods any way you like, except of course items three and four, which are mutually exclusive.

Skill handicap allows you to choose a wide rating range for the engine, from the novice level (700) up to IM or GM level (2500). For the lower rating levels a special handicap engine is used, which the developers found to make more human-like mistakes than the other engines.

If you want to play against the engine at full strength, but still have reasonable winning chances, then material handicaps are an interesting option. Here you start the game with a material advantage that may allow you to draw or win even if you blunder.

Time handicap and depth handicap decrease the strength of the engine and speed up the game at the same time. By giving the engine a very short time or restricting it to a low search depth you can finish a game in half the time (compared to equal time for both sides) as the engine will respond immediately to your moves.

It’s worth mentioning in this connection that you can also play blindfold games and semi-blindfold games (where all pieces look the same) against the engine. In that case you could also use one or more of the four handicap methods mentioned above to weaken the engine’s play.

Note that you have the option to play your games either in tournament mode or fun mode. In tournament mode the rules are basically the same as in normal tournament games where no take-backs or assistance is allowed. Players doing serious preparation for a tournament can choose this mode. In fun mode you are allowed to take back moves, get hints from Aquarium, etc. so this is the right mode if you want to relax by playing a casual game of chess.

	Play Mode There is a special play mode in Aquarium where you can play against Rybka and other chess engines. You switch to play mode by clicking the big Play button in the sidebar. The idea behind play mode is to give you everything you need to play a game of chess without unrelated features getting in your way. This is what play mode usually looks like. Here you see the sidebar (Navigation Pane) running down the left side and the Ribbon at the top. The working area shows the board on the left and on the right-hand side we have the clocks at the top, then the game itself and finally the opening book. The opening book window can be closed if you like.
		Play mode with the ribbon and the sidebar.

	If you want even more space for the board, simply click F11 and both the ribbon at the top and the sidebar will be minimized. Press F11 again when you want to restore the window to its previous state.
Play mode with maximized working area.

	User Profiles You may remember from my column about Peshk@ that the program keeps track of the performance of different users. You simply need to define a user profile for each of them. Aquarium uses a similar system. After switching to play mode, click the player name in the sidebar. Aquarium comes with a default user profile called “Player,” so that will be the name you see before you add your own user profile. In the illustration below, I’m about to add a third user profile. I opened the “Select player profile” dialog box by clicking the player name; Lisa in this example (highlighted in the illustration), and then I clicked the “New…” button and the “New profile” dialog was displayed. Here I must type the name of the player in the “Name” field and the estimated rating in the “Rating” field. When I click OK, the new player profile will be created.
		User profiles.

The illustration shows that I have already created two user profiles: John, with an estimated rating of 1200 and Lisa with a 1600 rating. The “Games” column shows that neither of them has played a game yet. If John wanted to play a game against Rybka, he would select his name from the list and click OK.

Besides creating user profiles for different persons, you may also want to create two or more profiles for yourself. You could, for instance, use one profile for serious training games and a different one for casual games.

As I have done before, I will warn you that the ratings in Aquarium may vary considerably from the rating level to which you are accustomed. The underlying problem is that there is no fixed mapping between chess strength and rating level, so different rating pools (e.g. different countries) use different rating levels. When it comes to playing chess engines, other factors such as the speed of your computer, the effect of different handicap methods, etc. can affect chess engines in various ways.

Starting a New Game You can start playing a game from the Aquarium menu, the Quick Access Toolbar, directly in play mode or you can start from any position in a game you are viewing from a database or in the Sandbox. The first method is to click the Aquarium button in the upper left corner of the window, select Play and then New Game as shown below. Here you can also start a new FischerRandom or Chess960 game, start a new game from a position that you define or you can change the play options.

Start play from the Aquarium menu.

The second method is to start a game from the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT).

	Click the clock icon (highlighted in the image above) to start a new game. The advantage of the QAT icon is that it is always visible. The clock icon is not displayed by default, so you need to add it by right-clicking over the QAT and selecting “Customize”.
		Start play from the QAT.

The third method is to switch manually to play mode (click the Play button in the sidebar) and click the “New Game” button in the “Home – Play” tab. This immediately starts a game using the current defaults. You can also select “Start from Position” if you want to set up the starting position of the game instead of starting from the initial position. As you can see, the “Resign” and “Stop Game” buttons can also be found on this tab.

Start a new game.

	If you are examining a database game or a game in the Sandbox, you can click the “Play this game” action link in the sidebar.
		Start play from database game.

What happens here is that the current game is copied to play mode up to the current position and you can start playing from there. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mainline position or one of the variations. When you start a game in this way, you are first asked about the time control you want to use and after that you can make your first move. You may also want the engine to make the first move. In that case click the “Force Move” button in the “Home – Play” tab on the ribbon.

The Game Control group.

Besides the “Force Move” button, the “Game Control” group contains the “Take Back” button, “Switch Sides” and the “Show Analysis” options. The first two buttons should be familiar to anyone who has played against the computer. The third one controls whether you see the engine’s analysis and the opening book while playing.

The Game Options

So far we have only seen how you can play a game using whatever settings may be in effect when you start the game. Now we will examine how you can access the most common settings, such as the engine to play against, the time controls, which side you play, handicaps, hints and other assistance, etc.

	The sidebar gives you a quick overview of the current settings, as you can see in the following image. You can click the blue underlined links to change the settings. At the top left you can see that Lisa is playing and we saw how you can switch to a different profile or create new ones. Delfi is a chess engine that comes with Aquarium. If you click the engine link you will get a list of all installed chess engines and can select a new opponent. The “Time Control” field shows that we will be playing a five minute game. Clicking the link allows you to select any time control you like. We have a closer look at the time control options later in this article. “Color” is set to “Automatic”, which means that you will switch sides after each game. If you click the link it cycles between “White”, “Black”, and “Automatic”.
		Quick settings.

“Handicap” is set to “No handicap.” This means that the engine will play at full strength and without material handicap. Clicking the link brings up a dialog box where you can select a variety of strength and material handicaps. We will have a detailed look at the handicap options below.

Finally, the engine rating is displayed, and you can see that Delfi’s rating is 2500.

After choosing the setting you prefer, you can start playing by clicking “New Game”.

	Getting Help If you are playing in fun mode (see the icon on the left in the illustration below), you can ask Aquarium for help while you are playing.
Fun mode and tournament mode.

The icon on the right is shown in the ribbon when you are playing in tournament mode. Tournament mode doesn’t allow any assistance while playing. You can switch between fun mode and tournament mode by clicking the icon, but you can’t switch the game to tournament mode after getting a hint or other help during the game. If you are playing in tournament mode and ask for assistance you are given a warning that it will require switching to fun mode.

	Assuming that you are playing in fun mode you can use the tools shown in the following image to get hints and other help while playing. If you click the Assist button, Aquarium shows the move that the engine recommends. If you click the small black triangle on the button, the following menu is displayed.
		Get assistance while playing.

Hint is equivalent to clicking Assist and shows the recommended move. Several Best Moves displays one or more green arrows showing the top candidate moves. Show Opponent’s Intention shows you what the engine is threatening, i.e. what it would do if it could move immediately again. The “Make Move” button makes the move recommended by the engine. You can use this button if you are not sure what to do next and want the engine to decide instead. Usually, you would do that after using the “Hint” button to see the move recommended by the engine.

The “Options” button opens a dialog box where you can tell Aquarium to watch your play and warn you if you play bad moves. It also defines how long the engine should search when you ask it for hints.

Here we see that “Warn about blunders” is selected, so Aquarium will let you know when you blunder and give you a chance to select a better move. “Blunder threshold” is set to 100 centipawns. It means that you are not warned unless the blunder is equivalent to losing a pawn or more. The percentage below the threshold says that a warning will not be issued unless the blunder decreases your winning chances by at least 2%. This focuses the warnings on the more interesting parts of the game. If you are completely lost, then dropping a pawn has no effect on the outcome of the game, so it would not be reported with the settings shown above. “Hint time” is set to two seconds, which means that the engine will base its hints on a two second search. Set these parameters to whatever you feel is appropriate based on the speed of your computer and your chess strength.

Handicap Settings We already saw that you can access the handicap settings from the sidebar by clicking the “Handicap” link. They are also accessible from the ribbon as shown below.

	Clicking the “Handicap” button brings up the handicap dialog box. There are radio buttons at the top of the dialog where you can select “None” when the engine will play at full strength, “Skill” for selecting rating handicaps and “Material” for material handicaps. Here we see the rating handicaps. The “Skill Settings” pane allows you to select from three different methods: Special engine (700-1900). Here Aquarium will always use a special rating handicap engine. It accepts a rating range from 700- 1900. Multivariation mode (1200-2400). The engine is run in multivariation mode and Aquarium picks one of the moves to play. The lower the rating, the more likely it is that a low-ranking move will be picked. Engine based (1200-2400). This method is only effective when you are playing against Rybka and uses its own internal handicap method.
		Three types of rating handicaps.

You may ask yourself which of these three methods is best. The answer is that if there was a proven best method, then there would be no reason to offer more than one. Play a few games and see which one you like best. Some may like to switch between these methods for variety as they produce very different games.

After you pick the handicap method, use the slider at the bottom of the dialog to select the rating level. Just remember what I said earlier about rating levels! Experiment and find a rating that makes you enjoy playing against the engine. That’s what matters.

If you select “Material” in the “Handicap” pane, Aquarium will display a list of available handicaps. They are categorized according to difficulty, from a pawn handicap to queen and two rooks. First you pick the category and in this case I have chosen the “Very Hard” category. I have clicked on a knight handicap and the diagram shows the initial position without the knight on b1. I might want to start the game without the knight on g1 instead. In that case all I need to do is click the “Next position” button below the board and Aquarium will remove the knight on g1 instead of b1. In general, the “Next position” button cycles between all available positions of the type you have chosen.

Material handicaps.

	Note the label at the top of the diagram. It says “Human” and marks the side that you will play; the black side in this case. But what if you wanted the engine to play the black side without the b8 knight? Traditionally, that is called “knight and move” and it is actually one of the options you can choose as shown in the next screenshot. After selecting the handicap, click OK and start the game.
		Knight and move handicap.

Time Handicaps Clicking the “Time Control” link in the sidebar displays the following dialog box. In order to set up a time handicap, make sure that “Same time for both players” is not selected. After that you can set the time for each side as you like. Set your time control in the “Player” pane and the engine’s time control in the “Engine” pane. In this case I have selected fifteen minutes and a five second increment after each move for myself. The poor engine only gets one minute for the whole game and no increment. Besides decreasing the strength of the engine, it speeds up the game as the engine will reply almost instantly. Of course I can combine the time handicap with a rating handicap (and even material handicap) to reduce the strength of the engine even further.

Time handicaps.

	We’ll have a look at two more examples. Here we are looking at a time per move time control.
		Time per move handicap.

	In this case I give myself five seconds for each move, but the engine only gets one second. In the third example we are looking at a fixed depth engine handicap. Of course there is no corresponding setting for the human player, so you only need to set a limit on the engine. Here I have chosen a very low depth, but even then Rybka can play a fairly strong game.
Fixed depth engine handicap.

The New Game Options If you want to access all the play options before starting a game, you can do so by selecting “Options” from the drop-down menu on the “New Game” button. Here we see that besides the new game options you can also choose to play a FischerRandom or a Chess960 game against the engine. In that case you can also apply the rating, time and depth handicaps described above.

If you select “Options,” you’ll see the following dialog box. I’m only showing the left half, but the right half allows you to set the time controls for the game. The “Event” field is automatically assigned by Aquarium and gives the “event” a name, but you can overwrite it with your own description. Instead of normal text you can also use variables, like those that Aquarium uses in the default string. The “Edit name” button (not visible in the image) shows the meaning of the variables. We have already covered “Player Color” (White, Black, Automatic), “Preferred Mode” (Tournament, Fun) and you choose the engine to play against in the “Engine name” list. If a chess engine gets into a lost position, it plays on until it is checkmated, while a human player resigns when he feels that continuing the game is pointless. You can force the engine to behave in a similar way. First, select “Resign if score is above” and then the evaluation difference (in pawns) that indicates a lost game. In this example I have selected five pawns. This means that the engine will resign if it finds itself five pawns or more behind for three successive moves.

New game options.

If you select “Ponder”, the engine will also think on your time. This is sometimes called “permanent brain”. The “Handicap” button displays the handicap dialog box that we examined above.

Finally, you can decide if loss on time is only flagged for the engine, for both players or not at all. If you select “For computer only” as in this example, you can ignore your own time control and take as much time as you like for your moves.

By the way, if you are looking forward to the new Aquarium version my crystal ball tells me that it will be available before the end of the month. It will be free for current Aquarium users.

Dadi Jonsson.

Aquarium 3.2.1 Update has been released just recently.

You can download it using ChessOK Downloader or from our site:
Full update from any version
Incremental update 3.2.0 to 3.2.1

The download size is 18 Mb.

Read below what’s new in Aquarium 3.2.1 (also available in the Aquarium FAQ):

Features

* Seriously reworked Setup position dialog
* You can change the opponent engine’s opening book during the game in Play mode
* You can have separate opening book setting for Play mode

Bugfixes

* Fixed occasional crash when starting infinite analysis
* Fixed the crash when infinite analysis is started upon closing IDEA
* Fixed the focus change from tree to notation that occurs when the mode is changed
* Fixed move number when setting up position - it’s no longer 1 in all cases
* Fixed move number ignoring when the position on board doesn’t change
* Fixed possible change of starting move number whenn pasting a game from clipboard or otherwise joining two notations. This also means that TB6 online respects the move numbers now.
* Fixed the fact database root was ignored for engine_games database
* Fixed the occasional situation when moves made from tree window were not reflected on the board
* Increased the total move limit from 500 to 1000 moves
* Fixed occasional JavaScript error (missing

The 2nd edition of the Grand Slam Masters Final takes place in Bilbao, September 6-12th 2009. The winners of the Nanching Pearl Spring, Corus-Wijk aan Zee, Ciudad de Linares and Mtel Masters-Sofia tournaments were due play in the final. However at the last minute Veselin Topalov has withdrawn and been replaced with Levon Aronian.
The every round start at 16.00 GMT, The last round start at 15.00 GMT.

Games: Round 1 [ PGN]

Round 2 LIVE!

• En ChessOk, aparte de venderte el Rybka y el Chess Assistant, ofrecen interesantes servicios gratuitos, como la transmisión de este torneo con comentarios del propio Rybka.
• La regla explicada en el Diario de un Entrenador.

Aquarium 3.2.0 Update has been released just recently.

You can download it using ChessOK Downloader or from our site:
Full update from any version
Incremental update 3.1.1 to 3.2.0

The download size is 18 Mb.

For German version: after installing the update, delete the file Aquarium.ger-rs-map.

Read below what’s new in Aquarium 3.2.0 (also available in the Aquarium FAQ):

Major Features

* Play mode: eliminated the observer engine. All engine assistance is now performed by the opponent engine.
* Play mode saves its state after exiting Aquarium. You can close Aquarium, then open it again and continue playing.
* Play mode: you can make moves (and get engine answers) from any position (in Fun mode): in variations and subvariations. This is more Fritz-like behaviour.
* You can export the game (game list, iBook page) as a ‘blog entry’, not to a separate HTML page.
* You can use Aquarium to create animated GIFs with board images.
* iBook edit mode is quite usable now. Most commands are presented as popup menu items, systax is highlighted etc.
* iBook search function is vastly enhanced.
* After pressing Esc (or otherwise stopping infinite analysis), the analysis window doesn’t disappear. Second Esc hides the window.

Minor Features

* You can add a single game to the tree.
* Adding game (or game list) to the tree now allows automatic move coloring.
* iBook writing: nested sections are allowed now.
* iBook writing: you can see what text in edit window corresponds to the selected text in View window.
* iBook writing: new commands are added to the command language.
* iBook writing: added some options to automatically convert the game notation to i-Book.
* DGT board input now allows inverting the position.
* Play mode: The time is now specified for the player and the engine (not for White and Black).
* Play mode: You can modify the clock values by double-clicking the clocks.
* The best line is not bold now in the infinite analysis display. It varies in color.
* Position search now does NOT respect castling rights.
* You can switch to a different Infinite Analysis preset while analyzing.
* Copy Board Image to Clipboard now creates the same image as ‘Save Board Image’.
* Engine Competitions list now have non-empty Standings for engine matches.
* Improvements to position setup: Move number, flip horizontally/vertically
* The move number from a pasted FEN string becomes the current move number.
* You can copy and paste the graphic commentary string (Aquarium specific).
* Added support for remote UCI engines via our servers.
* You can change the number of plies in infinite analysis with +/- keys, not only Num+/Num-.

Major bugfixes

* Fixed the bug in Engine-Engine matches when the engine was reloaded after each game if it had custom hash size settings.

Minor bugfixes

* Fixed the loss of game header when the game is moved between some Aquarium modes.
* iBook: in some cases the iBook commands misjudged the side to move.
* Increased minimum size for infinite analysis options window.
* Fixed occasional lack of last mistake commentary in Game Analysis.
* Fixed occasional appearance of 5-digit Elo ratings in PGN database reading.
* ‘Sensible’ window layout is shown after it was corrupted, not the blank window.
* Fixed incorrect timestamp placement in CQLSearchResults.eld
* Changed Infinite Analysis time display to a more convenient h:mm:ss
* The highlighted move in the Notation window is now visible after entering the mode.
* Fixed occasional bug when changing settings for one engine during IA affected other engines’ settings.
* Save board image: image sizes are accurate now.
* Save board image: opponent move red arrow is now preserved in the image.
* Fixed the situation when analysis presets were not loaded correctly.
* Fixed the loss of game header when the game is moved to another database via drag-and-drop.
* Fixed ‘List index out of bounds’ error when enabling Tree and Classifier for the iBook.
* Fixed excess database connections (and error message spam) when searching for position in current dataset.
* Fixed occasional display of incorrect Ribbon tab when closing the i-Book page.
* The status bar tooltips (IA history, engine state, etc.) do not disappear any more.
* Fixed spelling error in engine match dialog.
* Fixed inability to add text markers on the board.
* Fixed crash when editing text markers.
* Added more sensible failure message when opening a database locked by CA.
* Added size constraits to iBook page select dialog.

Discussion and feedback

Thread on Rybka Forum

In February 2009 I described a new feature of Rybka 3 Aquarium, Interactive Chess Books or iBooks. At that time the tools for creating iBooks were rather primitive, but a new version of Aquarium is expected soon and improved iBook writing tools are among the enhancements. In this column I will show you the basics of creating iBooks – enough to get you started writing your own. Just keep in mind that there are a many features that I only mention briefly, or skip completely, including some that are quite useful for larger writing tasks.

Based on the experience so far, we can see that iBooks are suitable for both small and large projects. You may prefer to use iBooks for your own personal annotations, for presenting tactical exercises and other training material, for web publishing, for preparing forum posts, etc. It has also been used successfully for jobs such as converting a 200 page chess book to iBook format.

Creating an iBook When starting an iBook, you may already have a database with the games that you want to use for the book. Otherwise you must start by creating a database. Switch to the database page or the Sandbox and select the Database tab in the ribbon. Click the ‘New’ button (highlighted in the screenshot below) and the “Data source properties” dialog box will be displayed. Here I have given the database the name “My-iBook” and when I click OK, a new window will be shown where I can define the game header fields. I accepted the defaults and clicked OK again. The database has now been created. This database will hold the games that I will use in the iBook. Note that we have created a native Aquarium database; this is the only type of database that can be used for iBooks.

Next we must tell Aquarium that we want to use the database for creating an iBook. The Database tab should still be active in the ribbon. Click the tool button in the lower right-corner of the Database group. Make sure that the new database you created is highlighted in the sidebar and then select “This database has i-Book attached to it” as shown in the image above. Finally click OK and an iBook will be created with the same name as the database. You only need to go through the above steps once for each new iBook and if you are basing it on an existing database, only the second step is required.

An iBook created for the current database.

From now on you can use the games in the database as input for your iBook. Since Aquarium keeps a live connection from the database to the iBook, you can be sure that the moves and variations in the iBook are an exact copy of the moves in the database. This eliminates many types of errors that are common in chess books.
	A live connection from database to iBook.

You can open and update the iBook database like any other database, even after you start writing. After all it is just a normal Aquarium database. Of course you have to be careful when you change games that are already being used in the iBook. The changes will be reflected in the iBook, which can be very convenient, e.g., if you find an improvement to a variation. In such cases it is often sufficient just to update the variation in the database and the iBook will be automatically updated.

Let’s say that you are going to write an iBook, but you don’t have the games, game fragments, and such in database format. This could, for instance, be the case if you are converting a printed book to iBook format. Then you would have all the moves in the text itself, but you need a way to convert them into something that the computer can understand and display on the chessboard. This is also supported in Aquarium and even here you get additional quality control, as illegal moves will be rejected.

Each author can decide how he writes the book. Some may prefer the database approach, where all the moves and variations in the book come from the database, while others like to do all their work within the book itself. Of course you can also mix the two methods within the same book, if you like.

	Opening an iBook After creating (or downloading) an iBook, you can open it just like a normal database. After clicking the Open button on the Database tab, the standard Windows file open dialog box will be shown. Here you should set the file type to *.ahb, which is the file type for iBooks, and then locate and select the book you want to open.
The iBook file type is *.ahb.

When you open a newly created iBook for the first time, you will see a chessboard, a “Game” window below the board and a “Page text” window on the right. The book itself will be displayed in the page text window. It can automatically load the correct game into the game window. The game window also shows moves that you play through in the book, solutions to tactical exercises, etc.
	The iBook working area.

	The iBook Ribbon Tab The iBook ribbon tab is split into three groups: “Browse”, “Edit” and “Options”. Back/Forward: These buttons have similar function as in web browsers where you can go backward and forward through recently viewed pages.
The “Browse” group.

• Refresh: This button updates all windows in the working area.
• Move to Sandbox: Moves the contents of the game window to the Sandbox. This function can be useful if you run into an interesting position or game in an iBook and want to analyze it further.
• Search: Searches for text in the current iBook.
• Page List: Displays a list of all pages in the iBook and allows you to jump directly to the selected page. A page in an iBook is usually a section or a chapter.

These three buttons are the most interesting for iBook authors. New Page adds a new page to the book. It also lets you choose options for the page, such as if the board and game window should be displayed and actions that are performed when the page is displayed. You can change all these options at a later time and we’ll have a closer look at them when we change the options for the pages in our new iBook. Book Options opens a dialog box where you can set global options for the book.

The “Edit” and “Options” groups.

If you select “Show tree panel” then the tree will be shown by default. You can override this option for individual pages. A classifier is the table of contents for the iBook and “Show classifier” determines if it is displayed or not. The author decides which pages go into the table of contents and how it is structured. This means that he can write the book in any order and then reorganize the chapters and sections as he wishes before publishing the book. The size of chess diagrams in the book is determined by “Diagram size (pixels)”. You can change the size at any time and all the diagrams will be resized automatically.

Global iBook options and access rights.

Sometimes you may want a specific page displayed when readers open your book. They may, for instance, prefer to go to the first page of the text instead of seeing the front cover every time they open the book. You can change the initial page by pressing the “Change” button following the “Initial page ID” field. It allows you to choose any of the pages in the book as the initial page when users open the book.

The “Edit Styles…” button allows you to define the formatting of the book’s text (headings, hyperlinks, etc.). You may want to do that if you have special formatting requirements or if you simply don’t like the default text formatting.

The “Access rights” panel allows authors to protect the contents of the book. This is relevant for commercial iBooks. Authors can decide if they “Allow printing and exporting” the book and if they “Allow editing,” i.e., if users can modify it. If you want to protect the book you must also set a password by clicking “Change password…” and select a password.

If the access rights allow, you can export the whole iBook to HTML by clicking the “Export to HTML” button. After selecting a destination directory and exporting the book, you can upload it to a website and allow visitors to view it in their browsers.

Editing an iBook Let’s add some content to our new iBook. When you click the “Edit Page” button on the ribbon, Aquarium opens the “Page text edit” window where you enter your text. There are several buttons and menus across the top of the window.
	The iBook editing window.

The most important one is the checkmark button (the leftmost button), which saves the page text, so use it often! As an additional incentive for saving often, this button also updates the book itself, so you can see it formatted in the “Page text” window. Let’s start with something simple and see some of the text formatting options that are available. iBooks use simple Wiki-type formatting which is widely used on the web. Those who are familiar with Wikis may choose to enter formatting commands manually, but others will probably prefer to use the iBook formatting menus. If you want to format your text, first highlight it with the mouse and then select the formatting option from the B/U menu as shown here.

Formatting selected text.

When you click the save button, the formatted text is displayed in the “Page text” window. As you can see from the menu, you can choose three levels of headings (Heading, Subheading and Sub-subheading), besides bold and italic text. The image below shows the markup for the different types of formatting and what it looks like in the book itself.
	Editing window and final formatting.

If you want to change the default styles you can do so in the book options. Using the formatting commands, you can write a whole book, but we still need some chess content. The following text comes from Jeroen Noomen’s introduction to his Rybka Aquarium Opening Book:

A stunning novelty in the Petroff

IM Merijn van Delft showed me a fantastic new idea in the Petroff (which already has been played a few times in practice):

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Nxe5 d6 4.Nf3 Nxe4 5.Nc3 Nxc3 6.dxc3 Be7 7.Bf4 Nc6 8.Qd2 Be6 9.O-O-O Bxa2!

Now black loses a piece after 10.b3 a5 11.Kb2, but of course that is not the end of the story. After the unfortunate bishop on a2 has been captured, black obtains dangerous counterplay leading to very interesting ‘non Petroff like’ positions.

Here we have some chess moves, but if we copy this text as it stands into our new iBook, it will just be normal text and you won’t be able to view the positions that Jeroen is discussing on the chessboard. Additionally, there is a missing diagram, which should be displayed after Black’s ninth move. We never want to show chess moves without being able to view them on the board as the “i” in “iBook” stands for “interactive” and there isn’t much interactivity involved in staring at the text of a normal book. We could of course add these moves manually to our iBook database and then pick them up from there, but let’s use some iBook magic instead.

We start by pasting the above text into the iBook. Then highlight the first nine moves with your mouse. Next select “line: style 0” from the “1.e4” menu. Save your book and voila, the moves come to life! Now you can click any of the moves in the game and the corresponding position will be displayed on the board. You can even do this with moves in descriptive format and they will be automatically converted to algebraic notation. The reason why we chose “line: style 0” here is that “style 0” corresponds to the mainline. “line: style 1” on the other hand is used for variations.

Normal text turned into playable moves.

We still don’t have the diagram that was in Jeroen’s introduction, following Black’s ninth move. Normally, you would need the FEN string for a position in order to create a diagram, but again there is an easier way. Place the cursor below the move sequence and select “Diagram for current position” from the rightmost menu button (“Other options”). When you save the text, the diagram will be displayed, showing the correct position after the ninth move.

The diagram will show the current position.

	Let’s take a look at another timesaving feature. If you are converting normal text to iBook as we are doing here, it may take some time to search for and find the chess moves in the text. For quickly finding and highlighting moves, click the magnifying glass as shown in the image above. After that you can use the method we saw earlier to convert the text to clickable chess moves.
Find and highlight chess moves in the text.

With just a few mouse clicks we have converted normal text with chess moves into an iBook where you can click each move and see the position on the chessboard in Aquarium. Here is a screenshot that shows what happens when we click the last move, 11.Kb2. The whole variation from the iBook is displayed in the game window, ending with the move we clicked. This means that you can now switch to the game window and quickly move backward and forward in the variation and even click the “Move to Sandbox” button if you want to analyze it with Rybka.

iBook moves displayed in game window.

	When you start writing iBooks, you may notice an extra button that appears on the right-hand side of the page editing toolbar.
A repeat button.

This button allows you to repeat the previous command, so it changes depending on what you were doing. You will find that this can come in quite handy; for instance, when you are converting existing chess text to iBook format. Variations We have now seen how to convert text with chess moves to iBook format. Next we’ll see how you can show variations in addition to the mainline, but let’s create a new page in the book for that. Click the “New Page” button on the ribbon and a dialog box for defining the page will be displayed. I’m only changing one field here, the page title at the top. I call the page “Variations”. There are also fields that let you decide if the board and game window are displayed when the page is opened. I left them unchanged, so both windows will be displayed. Note the drop-down list that shows “”. You can define page templates by selecting “” from this drop-down list. A template contains boilerplate text, such as a top heading and links to next and previous pages at the bottom.

Creating a new iBook page.

The OnLoad instructions are frequently used by authors, especially if they are basing their books on games in the iBook database. In that case you could, for instance, automatically load game number five from the database into the game window when the page is opened. You would do that by entering the command load_game(5) into this field.

After changing the page title, click OK to create the new page. We’ll use the same mainline as before, but add a variation on the second move:

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 (2…Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Bxc6 Ruy Lopez Exchange Variation) 3.Nxe5 d6 4.Nf3

After pasting this text into the newly created page, do the following:

1. Select the first two moves and convert them just like we did in the first example.
2. Select the moves in the variation and convert them, only this time you select “line: style 1” from the menu, indicating that it is a variation and not the mainline.
3. Select the rest of the moves, starting with 3.Nxe5 and convert them to mainline moves.

When you save the page, the results should look as follows:

The markup for the output shown in the image looks like this: [line(1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6,0)] ([line(2...Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Bxc6,1)] Ruy Lopez Exchange Variation) [line(3.Nxe5 d6 4.Nf3 Nxe4 5.Nc3 Nxc3 6.dxc3 Be7 7.Bf4 Nc6 8.Qd2 Be6 9.O-O-O Bxa2,0)]

You must be careful if you change anything within the line command (or any other iBook command for that matter). It can only handle chess moves, so no additional text is allowed.

Another option is to use the push_line and pop_line commands for nested variations. I will not describe these commands in this introduction, but they are necessary for deeply nested variations.

Automatic Conversion of Annotated Games If you have a fully annotated game, you may want to convert it directly to iBook without any further editing. First you must add the game to the database. In our example the database is My-iBook.dsn. You can open the database and add the game in the same way as for any other database. After that it’s available for use in the iBook. As before we’ll create a new page in the iBook for this example.

Load game #1 when the page is displayed.

This time we take advantage of the “OnLoad instructions” and load the game we just added to the database when the page is displayed with the load_game(1) command. When you click OK the page will be created and the game will be displayed in the game window. Finally, right-click in the game window and select Convert to iBook -> Game as shown in the screenshot below. That’s all! The game with all variations and annotations will be converted to iBook format.

Game with annotations converted to iBook.

Additional Features

Admittedly, this introduction to writing iBooks barely touches the surface of the tools that auhtors have at their disposal. The examples I presented are simple, but below I give a quick overview of other features that are helpful for writers:

• Links. Authors can insert links in the text that take the reader to a different page in the book. External links (e.g., to web pages) can also be inserted.
• Diagrams with graphic markers are supported.
• Diagrams for a specific move or user defined position. Writers are not limited to diagrams for the “current” position. They can specify a move number or even a FEN string allowing user defined positions.
• Images. Images can be displayed in the text.
• Jump to a specific position when a page is loaded. We saw in the examples above how a game can be loaded when a page is opened. If you are going to start your discussion from a certain position in the game, you can jump automatically to that position.
• Automatic loading of multiple games. You can load a game automatically when a page is displayed, but what if you want to discuss several games on the same page? Ideally, the correct game should be loaded and displayed whenever you encounter a new game on the page. That’s what Sections are for. Simply enclose each game in a section that loads the game. Whenever the user clicks a move within the section, that game will be loaded and displayed.
• More flexibility in presenting game commentary. You can slice and dice the game any way you like and present it in the way that you think is most effective instead of being restricted to the traditional format for game commentary.
• iBook export: desktop publishing, printing, blogs and self-contained HTML pages. You can export a whole book or the current page.

Selecting Moves and Variations There are many issues that surface when writing interactive chess books. We have already seen that it’s easy to convert a whole game to iBook format and there are also simple methods available for converting the current move, the current variation or a whole variation complex. The real challenge comes when you want a finer control over the display of moves and commentary, especially for games with many variations. When you are basing your writing on games in the iBook database, there are three ways to select a move sequence from a game. These methods even work for deeply nested variations. The image below shows a game fraction and we are interested in commenting on one of its variations (highlighted in yellow), which actually contains moves from the mainline a first level variation and a second level variation.

Three methods of selecting a variation.

Here are the methods you can use to select such move sequences from the game:

1. You can add special annotations to moves in the game, which you can refer to in the iBook. These are called anchors. An anchor is a name enclosed in double slashes: “//”. In this example we use //Anchor// and the arrow points to the iBook command that would select the move sequence we are interested in.
2. You can point to a position in the game by giving the FEN string for the position as shown in the second example in the image. Both this method and using anchors give you access to all the moves leading up to this point in the game, starting from move one.
3. The third method is currently my favorite. Here you specify the first move of each variation leading to the variation of interest. The variation starting with 30…Qe8 is a second level variation. It is a sub-variation of the first level variation starting with 29…Qe1+. Therefore the path to our move sequence is “29…Qe1 30…Qe8” as shown in the third example. The difference from the two other methods is that this method returns all the moves to the end of the last variation (the variation starting with 30…Qe8 in this case).

After you have specified a move sequence using one of these methods, it becomes the current line in the iBook. This means that you can display selected moves from the variation simply using their move number. After commenting on the selected moves, you can display the next set of moves, etc.

Further information

I have briefly described some of the tools available for iBook writers. For detailed information you should refer to the “iBook Command Reference,” which will be released at the same time as the new Aquarium version. Sample iBooks showing how these tools are used in practice will also be available for download.

Dadi Jonsson.

The 5th FIDE Grand Prix tournament will take part in Jermuk, Armenia from August 8th to 24th.
Number of players: 14.
Average ELO is 2719. It is 19th FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Round robin.
Time control: 2 hour for 40 moves + 1 hour to 20 moves + 15 min and 30 sec/move.
Free days: 14th and 19th August

All rounds start at 11.00 GMT.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Games: Round 1 [ PGN], Round 2 [ PGN]

Ivanchuk - Aronian 1/2 brInarkiev - Leko 0-1 brKamsky - Bacrot 1/2 brBacrot - Kasimdzhanov 1/2 brAlekseev - Akopian 1/2 brCheparinov - Jakovenko 1-0 brKasimdzhanov - Karjakin 1/2 brGelfand - Eljanov 1/2 brAronian - Alekseev 1-0 brGelfand - Karjakin 1/2 brInarkiev - Ivanchuk 1/2 brAkopian - Cheparinov 1/2 brLeko - Eljanov 1/2 brJakovenko - Kamsky 1-0 Aronian (2768) (ARM) brLeko (2756) (HUN) brIvanchuk (2703) (UKR) brGelfand (2755) (ISR) brBacrot (2721) (FRA) brKarjakin (2717) (UKR) brAlekseev (2714) (RUS) brKamsky (2717) (USA) brAkopian (2712) (ARM) brKasimdzhanov (2672) (UZB) brEljanov (2716) (UKR) brCheparinov (2718) (BUL) brInarkiev (2675) (RUS) brJakovenko (2760) (RUS)

I just downloaded this neat tool from http://chessok.com/?p=22212 and after playing with it for a few minutes – I must say it looks pretty neat. The interface shell itself is free, it comes with a few demo courses and you can download more for extra charge. This follows a model similar to what Chessbase is doing with ChessBase Light as a viewer for their media lessons, where the viewer is free, but you have to pay for extra courses. Here are a few screenshots of the demo endgame course I downloaded off their website also for free (based on a book by Alexander Panchenko, who sadly recently passed away). Even without buying anything – there is a fair bit of interesting content for you to look at, before deciding which course is most worth your hard earned $25.

Training mode:

Theory mode:

The course browser, as you can see – I got the demo one:

From what I understand, this is to replace all the old training software that Convekta had, where you had to install a separate shell for every course, which was obviously more clunky, and probably harder to sell.

The GRENKELEASING Rapid World Championship will take place in Mainz, Germany from 31th July to 2nd August.
World Chess Champion and Chess Classic serial winner Vishwanatan Anand will try to defend his title for the 11th time in a row.

Tournament format: Double round robin. Then matches for 1-2 and 3-4 places.

The first round start at 17.30 GMT, The second round start at 18.30 GMT, The third round start at 19.30 GMT.

Time control: 20 min + 5 sec/move.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

First Day [ PGN]

Nepomniachtchi - Naiditsch 1-0 brAnand - Aronian 0-1 brAnand - Nepomniachtchi 0-1 brAronian - Naiditsch 1-0 brNaiditsch - Anand 0-1 brNepomniachtchi - Aronian 1/2 Anand (2788) (IND) brAronian (2768) (ARM) brNaiditsch (2697) (GER) brNepomniachtchi (2632) (RUS)

In April 2009 I wrote an introduction to Peshka@, the new ChessOK training and improvement framework. Since then the ChessOK developers have been hard at work, not only completing its development, but also converting existing courses into the new Peshk@ format. This means that the whole ChessOK training catalog will be available for Peshk@ upon its release.

The latest features added to Peshk@ include 5×5 “helper” boards and exercise transformations, such as those found in CT-ART (see October 2006 and November 2006), effectively increasing the number of training positions. With these additions Peshk@ can handle all the different types of exercises that are available in existing ChessOK training courses. Note that once a training feature has been added to Peshk@ it can be used in any course designed for the program. This means, for instance, that all the CT-ART specific training features will be available to Peshk@ training course authors in the future. This is one of the advantages of Peshk@ over the old approach where a different program was required for each training course.

In this column I’ll focus on how to get started with Peshk@ and how you can download and try out demo courses. I also cover how you can purchase additional training courses. For a quick introduction on how to train with Peshk@, see my April 2009 column.

Getting Started With Peshk@ You can purchase Peshk@ along with a training course from your favorite chess shop. It’s available on DVD and for download. Peshk@ itself is freeware. You only pay for the courses. You can download the program and some demo courses and try them out before you decide to purchase anything: Free Peshk@ download. After downloading, run PeshkaSetup. This is a standard Windows installation program.

Follow the instructions and you should complete the installation without a problem. If you select the installation defaults, the program will be started after the installation is completed. The first thing you are asked to do is to create a user profile by entering your name and estimated Elo rating. Here the user has selected the name Alan and an estimated rating of 1200. For a discussion of how this information is used by the program, see my April 2009 column. After filling out this form, click the Create button to create your profile.

Since the free Peshk@ download doesn’t have any training courses installed, you are next shown the Course Browser for installing the first training course. Here Peshk@ shows you a list of available demo courses that you can download free. These are all samples from actual training courses and you can upgrade to the full course at a later time. If you previously purchased one of these training programs, you can upgrade them for use in Peshk@ here.

Otherwise you should take advantage of the demos to find the courses that will help you improve most. We will have a closer look at the Course Browser later in this article, but now we need to install the first training course. A course listing with basic information is shown below.
	Training course information.

	Here we see information about “Complete Chess Course.” First we notice that it is clearly marked as a demo. The icon on the left has “DEMO” stamped on it and the same text follows the name of the course. The second line shows that the course was authored by Convekta. We also see that it is aimed at players with a rating between 1200 and 2000 and that it is in English.
Training course description.

If you click the course listing, you get a more detailed description as shown in the image below. Following the information about the training course there is a download link on the right-hand side of the screen.

When you click the “Free download!” link, the course will be downloaded and automatically installed in Peshk@. Note that the course is also automatically transferred from the “Free Online” category to “Installed,” so you can always see which courses have been installed. The numbers in parenthesis, following each category name, show the number of courses in that category. In this case we have installed one training course and there are seven more free courses available for download.

The “Installed” category shows courses installed in Peshk@.

You can see that the hierarchical course list looks very similar to a list of directories and files in Windows Explorer. It also works the same. You can click the +/- sign in front of a folder icon to expand/collapse the contents of a group, or double click the folder icon itself if you prefer.

You can continue and download as many demo courses as you like. After installation is complete, click the OK button at the bottom of the Course Browser and you can start practicing!

The Course Browser After trying out the demo courses that you downloaded when you first started the program you may want to download or purchase additional courses.

You can always start the Course Browser by clicking the “Courses” button on the “Home” tab as shown in the image.

The Peshk@ Course Browser has evolved quite a bit since I first wrote about the beta version. As we saw above, the course browser shows you a list of available training courses. You can see which ones have already been installed and additional courses that are either available for free download or can be purchased. There are already around twenty training courses available, covering various topics. This number will grow as new courses are released and soon there will be an abundance of courses to choose from.

The Course Browser has three methods to organize, filter, and sort the training course list, ranging from predefined grouping and filtering options to full control over all options.

The six “Group by” and “Show courses” buttons offer the simplest method of grouping and filtering the list. The highlighted (orange) buttons show which options are selected. In this example, the courses are grouped by “Status.” This means that we would get one group for “Installed” courses, another one for “Free Online” courses and the third group with “Online” courses, i.e. courses that you can purchase. In this case, however, the “Online” courses won’t be displayed at all since they are excluded in the “Show courses” filter. These are the choices that were used to display the courses in the Course Browser screenshots above.

A simple method for grouping and filtering courses.

If I clicked the “1. Status” button in the screenshot above, I would remove the grouping and the courses would be displayed as a simple list. If I then click the “Difficulty”, “Theme” and “Status” buttons in this order, the results would be as shown below.
	Three-level grouping of courses.

Here the courses are first grouped by difficulty, then by status and finally by theme. Note that the labels of the “Group by” buttons have changed to reflect the current grouping levels. The “Show courses” buttons simply include or exclude the corresponding courses from the list. If you want more control over the grouping and filtering, you can click the “Filters” or “Advanced” buttons in the upper right corner of the Course Browser window.

Detailed filtering options.

If you click the “Filters” button, the following screen is shown. The options are divided into the same three groups as the “Group by” buttons we examined above: “Difficulty”, “Status” and “Theme”. In this example, all difficulty levels are included: Beginners, Club player, Intermediate and Advanced. In the “Status” pane, only “Installed” and “Free Online” are selected and that corresponds to the “Show courses” buttons we examined above. Finally, all “Themes” are selected.

Filter definitions.

If you click the “Advanced” button in the course browser, you get even more control over the display of the training course list. As the name indicates, you can use this method if you have advanced requirements for organizing, filtering and sorting the course list. Here you have access to all the options that we saw in the “Filter,” but additionally you can sort the items within each group level and you have access to more fields that you can use for grouping.

Advanced filtering with sorting.

You can create up to seven group levels, but the screenshot above shows the first two: “Difficulty” (#1) and “Status” (#2). The selection of “Group by” within the “Grouping method” panel for both items shows that they will be used to create a hierarchical list. I have also selected “Sort ascending” for both items. This means, for instance, that the easier courses will be listed before the more difficult ones within the “Difficulty” group. As the following image shows, you can choose from seven different fields for grouping and sorting.

Grouping and sorting fields.

Most of these fields are self explanatory. Information about “Status”, “Theme,” and “Difficulty” can be found above (see for instance the “Filters” dialog box). “Author” is the course author, “Package” can be either “Demo” or “Full,” “Elo Rating” corresponds to the rating range for which the course was designed and “Language” is the course language.

Note that the same course can fall into more than one category, so it may be listed within more than one group in the hierarchical list. An example is a training course that covers both strategy and tactics.

Registering Peshk@ Before you can purchase additional courses you need to register. Start by clicking the “Users” button in the “Tools” tab as shown here.

The “Switch user” panel will be displayed. Click the link in the “Online information” column as shown here and then the “Register now!” link in the login dialog.
	Online registration.

The registration dialog box will appear. Choose a login name and password and enter your email address.

When you have finished filling out the form click “Register” to complete the registration. After a successful registration you will be automatically logged in and should see the following message.

Here you can click “View Courses” to open the Course Browser. Notice that the text at the top of the window has changed and now shows your current balance and a link to top up the balance.

Purchasing additional training courses Before making a purchase you need to add some money to your account. You can do that by clicking the “top up balance” link. This takes you to the ChessOK website where you can buy a Peshk@ payment card. I paid for the payment card with PayPal, which allows immediate download (you can buy more than one payment card in the same purchase). After confirming the order I switched back to Peshk@ and opened the Course Browser. I decided to purchase the Complete Chess Course, which I downloaded above as a demo.

After locating the Complete Chess Course in the Course Browser, I clicked the purchase link, shown in the image above. The course was automatically downloaded and installed and the purchase link was replaced with a text confirming that as shown in the next screenshot. The Complete Chess Course is now ready for use and you can start training! For a quick introduction to some of the training features, see my April 2009 column.

After installing several courses, you can use the Course Browser to select a course for training. Click on an installed course to highlight it and then click the OK button. The selected course will be opened for training and a list of training tasks/lessons will be displayed in the navigator window. If you bought your training courses on a DVD, you need to activate them after installation. This is also done through the Course Browser.

Peshk@ is the next generation of ChessOK’s training programs.

When you are ready to activate the course, click “Activate installed” or “Activate courses” and enter the activation code. The DVD package comes with an activation code. Buying a download version of Peshk@ with a training course works similarly. In that case the activation code will be emailed to you.

Dadi Jonsson

The 42nd traditional GM tournament in Biel will take part from July 19th to 31st.

Average ELO is 2716. It is 19th FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Doulbe round robin.
Free days: 22nd and 26th July

All rounds start at 12.00 GMT.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Gelfand (2755) (ISR) brMorozevich (2751) (RUS) brAlekseev (2714) (RUS) brVachier-Lagrave (2703) (FRA) brIvanchuk (2703) (UKR) brCaruana (2670) (ITA)

Very strong GM’s tournament will take place in San Sebastian, Spain from July 7th to 16th.

12th World Champion Anatoly Karpov will take part in this tournament.

Average ELO is 2682. It is 18th FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Round robin.
Free day: 10th July

All rounds start at 15.00 GMT. Last round starts at 12.00 GMT.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Games: Round 1 [ PGN], Round 2 [ PGN], Round 3 [ PGN], Round 4 [ PGN], Round 5 [ PGN]

Svidler - Movsesian 1/2 brSan Segundo - Ponomariov 1/2 brNakamura - Karpov 1-0 brVachier-Lagrave - Kasimdzhanov 1-0 brVallejo Pons - Granda Zuniga 1-0 brNakamura - Vachier-Lagrave 1-0 brMovsesian - Vallejo Pons 1/2 brKasimdzhanov - Svidler 1/2 brKarpov - Ponomariov 1/2 brGranda Zuniga - San Segundo 1-0 brVallejo Pons - Kasimdzhanov 1/2 brVachier-Lagrave - Karpov 1-0 brSan Segundo - Movsesian 1/2 brPonomariov - Granda Zuniga 1-0 brSvidler - Nakamura 1/2 brKarpov - Granda Zuniga 1/2 brMovsesian - Ponomariov 0-1 brKasimdzhanov - San Segundo 1/2 brNakamura - Vallejo Pons 1-0 brVachier-Lagrave - Svidler 0-1 brSvidler - Karpov 1-0 brVachier-Lagrave - Vallejo Pons 1/2 brPonomariov - Kasimdzhanov 1/2 brSan Segundo - Nakamura 0-1 brGranda Zuniga - Movsesian 1/2 Svidler (2739) (RUS) brPonomariov (2727) (UKR) brMovsesian (2716) (SVK) brNakamura (2710) (USA) brVachier-Lagrave (2703) (FRA) brVallejo Pons (2693) (ESP) brKasimdzhanov (2672) (UZB) brGranda Zuniga (2647) (PER) brKarpov (2644) (RUS) brSan Segundo (2570) (ESP)

The traditional Top GM’s tournament in Dortmund, Germany will take part from July 2nd to 12th.
Average ELO is 2744. It is 20th FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Double round robin.
Free day: 7th July

All rounds start at 14.00 GMT. Last round starts at 12.00 GMT.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Magnus Carlsen - Dmitry Jakovenko 1-0 brPeter Leko - Vladimir Kramnik 1/2 brArkadij Naiditsch - Etienne Bacrot 1/2 Magnus Carlsen (2772) (NOR) brDmitry Jakovenko (2760) (RUS) brVladimir Kramnik (2759) (RUS) brPeter Leko (2756) (HUN) brEtienne Bacrot (2721) (FRA) brArkadij Naiditsch (2697) (GER)

This month we’ll examine infinite analysis presets in Rybka Aquarium. Presets allow you to store and quickly access your favorite analysis settings so you don’t have to configure them manually every time you want to use them. A single preset can hold advanced analysis configurations consisting of multiple engines and analysis panels. I assume that the reader is familiar with the basics of infinite analysis in Rybka Aquarium, which was discussed in my July 2008 column.

Presets vs. Traditional Analysis

When infinite analysis is mentioned, most users will think of a single chess engine analyzing a position and displaying the results in the analysis pane, but Aquarium offers much more:

1. Concurrent analysis by two or more chess engines.
2. Multiple analysis panes, or panels as they are called in Aquarium.
3. One or more chess engines analyzing in the each panel.
4. Different analysis parameters for each engine. One of them can do normal analysis, while the next one analyzes threats, the third runs in multi-variation mode etc.

All these types of analysis configurations can be saved as presets in Aquarium. Besides complex multi-engine setups, presets can also be useful for creating shortcuts to simple, frequently used types of analysis. Here are a few ideas:

1. If you have a large number of engines installed you can create presets for the engines that you use most often for analysis.
2. Presets for each of the most used engines analyzing in multivariation mode with a specific delta (MultiPV_cp).
3. A preset for analyzing only moves displayed in the tree pane.
4. A preset with an engine analyzing threats.

Presets are the fastest way to start a specific type of analysis. You just select a preset from a list and the analysis starts with the specified parameters, engine(s) and analysis panel(s). Once the analysis has started you can of course modify the parameters as you like, such as increasing or decreasing the number of lines in multi-variation mode.

Note that presets running multiple engines require a multiprocessor computer (dual processor, quad processor etc.). It is not advisable to analyze with two engines simultaneously on a single processor computer.

Although convenient, analysis presets are neither required to run infinite analysis nor do they interfere in any way with basic infinite analysis. You can still start infinite analysis by pressing the space bar or by using the Analyze button on the Analysis tab.

Configuring a Preset When you want to create a new analysis preset, switch to the analysis tab. Now you can click the “Start Custom” button, or the black triangle on the “Analyze” button, and then select “Options” as shown in the image.

	This opens the “Infinite analysis options” dialog box, where you can define the analysis parameters for the preset. The difference is that when you click the OK button the analysis starts immediately if you used the “Start Custom” button.
The infinite analysis options.

The options are split into two main sections. A list of all available engines is displayed on the left-hand side where you can specify the analysis panels and choose the engines to analyze in each of them. When you highlight an engine in the list you can adjust its analysis parameters on the right-hand side of the window. We’ll start by having a closer look at the engine selection and panel setup. The “Engine” column lists all installed chess engines. Following that, there is one column for each analysis panel. The panels are numbered starting from one as the column headings show. If we look down the column for panel one, we see that there is a check mark in the “Rybka 3 w32” line, which means that it will analyze in panel one. Similarly, we see that “Rybka 3 Dynamic w32” will analyze in panel two.

Analysis panel setup.

The “Number of analysis panels” at the bottom of the image lets you define the number of analysis panels that will be present when analyzing. Two panels will be used in this example. A panel is only displayed during analysis if it has an engine associated with it. If we start analysis using the preset shown above (it’s actually the standard preset “1 core + 1 core”) it will look something like this when the analysis starts. We see two analysis panels with Rybka 3 analyzing in the top panel and Rybka 3 Dynamic in the other one. Here we also see one of the advantages of multiple engine analysis. The two engines suggest different moves. Rybka 3 wants to play 33.Rb1 at depth 19, but the Dynamic version likes 33.Rc1 at the same depth. This is the reason why many users prefer to analyze important positions with more than one engine.

Infinite analysis with two analysis panels.

If the engines agree on the best move, then you can be more confident that it’s a good move. If they disagree, then you can add their suggestions to the list of candidate moves to analyze further.

If you are only interested in the best line found by each engine or want to save space you can run the two engines in the same panel. Just change the panel setup in the analysis options so it looks like this. Here we see that Rybka Dynamic and Rybka 3 have both been assigned to panel one. An engine is added to a panel by clicking in the corresponding panel column. Note that it is not sufficient to click the engine’s name. If you want to add a second engine to a panel you must use Ctrl+Click; i.e., hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the panel cell. Use the same method if you want to remove an engine from a panel.

	This is how the analysis window would look in this case. When you compare this output to the one where each engine analyzed in its own panel you can see that here you get a more compact view of the analysis and it requires less screen space.
Two engines analyzing in the same panel.

When you compare this output to the one where each engine analyzed in its own panel you can see that here you get a more compact view of the analysis and it requires less screen space. Even when several engines are analyzing at the same time, each of them can be configured separately. First highlight the engine by clicking on it in the “Active engines” list in the “Infinite analysis options” and then select the options in the “Engine options” pane as shown in the image below.

Individual engine settings.

Most of the options you see here were explained in my previous article about infinite analysis, but Aquarium is constantly evolving and a couple of new options have been added since then. When you select “Opponent Move” you can now specify “Limited Depth.” In this example I have set this parameter to eight. This means that when the engine starts analyzing it will first analyze the opponent’s threats until it has reached depth eight. Then it will show the opponent’s main threat as a curved, red arrow on the board as shown in the diagram below. This is a position from the game Fischer-Geller, Skopje 1967, which was analyzed in my January 2009 column. Black just played 20…Qb7 and it is White’s move. Even with “Limited Depth” set as low as eight, Geller’s idea of 21…Ba4!!, which caught Fischer by surprise, is uncovered. After pointing out Black’s threat, the engine turns to analyzing the position from White’s side.

Black threatens …Ba4.

Note that this option is intended for a quick automatic check and doesn’t display anything in the analysis window. Its only output is the curved arrow.

Multi-variation mode was also described in the January column. If you want to use the “Delta” parameter but are unsure about which value to choose, I suggest that you start by setting it to 50 centipawns. It makes the multi-variation analysis more efficient as Rybka doesn’t waste time getting exact scores for moves that are 50 centipawn worse than the best move found so far.

The “Tree usage” options were also described in the January column. I would just like to emphasize that this option is based on moves that are displayed in the tree pane, which can combine moves from many trees in addition to moves in the game notation. This means that if you are analyzing a position that is not found in the active tree configuration, “Ignore moves in tree panel” can be used to analyze alternatives to the moves that were played in the game. If the game is annotated, then it would analyze moves that were not played and are not present in any variation.

The “Personalities” button allows you to specify parameters for the engine that is currently highlighted in the active engines list. When you click the button, you get a list of available parameters as shown in the next screenshot. The title bar shows that the settings apply to Rybka 3 w32. I’m only showing the top and the bottom of the dialog box. The most important parameter when creating a multi-engine analysis preset is the number of CPUs (or cores) assigned to each engine. You must make sure that the total number of CPUs used by the engines is not greater than the number of CPUs in your computer. If you exceed that number, the engines will start fighting for CPU time with unpredictable results. You must also make sure that the total hash size of the engines in the preset doesn’t exceed available memory.

Analysis preset parameters for an engine.

In the image above, I have set Max CPUs to one. Note that the background color of the field is changed to indicate that it has been modified. This allows you to keep track of which fields you have changed for each engine in the analysis configuration. The “Restore Defaults” button at the bottom of the dialog box replaces all the changes you have made with the default values.

If you change any of the settings in the “Infinite analysis options”, clicking the “Analyze” button will analyze using the new settings, even after you exit and restart Aquarium. Clicking the “Start Custom” button opens the “Infinite analysis options” with the settings you specified.

Saving and Activating Presets After testing different analysis configurations and figuring out what works best for you, you will want a quick access to your favorite presets. Therefore, Aquarium allows saving analysis presets. Each preset can be given a descriptive name so that later on you can quickly pick the right preset from the list of available presets. When you have found a configuration that you are happy with, do as shown in the image below. First click the downward pointing triangle on the Analyze button and select “Options,” as shown in the illustration (you can also use the “Start Custom” button as explained before). The “Infinite analysis options” will be displayed. Click “Save current settings.” Finally enter the preset name in the “Save preset” dialog box and click OK. In this example, I named the preset “Rybka – Zappa (threats)” to remind me that Rybka is analyzing normally (single variation mode) using all available cores except one, which Zappa uses to analyze the opponent’s threats.

Saving a new analysis preset.

After this, the new preset is ready for use. All saved presets can be accessed by clicking the downward pointing triangle on the “Start Custom” button. Here we see a list of seven presets, with the new one we just created highlighted at the bottom of the list. After clicking, the analysis starts immediately using the selected preset. As you have now seen, analysis presets can save you time when using infinite analysis. Complex analysis configuration, even those involving multiple engines and panels, can be picked from a list instead of requiring manual configuration every time you need them. Dadi Jonsson.

Starting analysis using a saved preset.

The 10th Anatoly Karpov’s tournament will take part in Poikovsky, Russia from June 3rd to 12th.
Average ELO is 2695. It is 18th FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Round robin.
Free day: 8th June

All rounds start at 10.00 GMT
ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Alexei Shirov (2745) (ESP) brGashimov, Vugar (2730) (AZE) brRublevsky, Sergei (RUS) (2702) brNaiditsch, Arkadij (GER) (2700) brBologan, Viktor (MDA) (2690) brOnischuk, Alexander (USA) (2684) brEfimenko, Zahar (UKR) (2682) brMotylev, Alexander (RUS) (2677) brInarkiev, Ernesto (RUS) (2676) brSutovsky, Emil (ISR) (2660)

The traditional rapid match between the best hungurian chess player Peter Leko (2751, 9th place on FIDE rating list) and Wotld Champion Viswanathan Anand (India, 2783, 2nd place) will take part from June 2nd to 7th in Miscolc, Hungary .
Match format: 8 games.
Time control: 25 min+10 sec/move.

Match starts June,3 at 17.30 GMT

ChessOK will thoroughly analyze each game with Rybka 3 Aquarium.

Rapid chess match between the best czech chess player David Navara (2654) and Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine, 2746) will take part from May 27th to 31st in Prague , Czech Republic .
Match format: 8 games.
Time control: 25 min+10 sec/move.

Match starts May,27 at 16.00 GMT

ChessOK will thoroughly analyze each game with Rybka 3 Aquarium.

ChessOK is proud to announce the immediate availability of Peshk@, the newest member of its training and improvement family. Peshk@ is a modern chess improvement and training tool from the developers of CT-ART, one of the most popular and respected tactics training programs.

Additional training modules. Besides the training module that comes with Peshk@, a selection of additional modules is offered, covering a wide range of subjects from the opening to the endgame and from strategy to tactics.

Familiar features in a modern user interface. If you are familiar with older ChessOK training products, you will feel right at home with Peshk@:

• Keeps track of the progress of multiple users.
• Study the material and then test your knowledge
• Elo rating history
• Performance statistics
• Play against a chess engine
• Analyze with a chess engine

Peshk@ is available for download or on DVD in our new and improved online shop.

These days it’s hard to keep up with everything that is happening at ChessOK in a monthly column. In recent months the focus has mostly been on Rybka Aquarium, but now they have a brand new product, Peshk@, which is to be released soon. It is a welcome addition to their long line of respected training and improvement programs. Many readers are probably familiar with ChessOK training programs, such as CT-ART, Chess Tactics for Beginners etc. Peshk@ (”peshka” is the Russian word for “pawn”) is a completely new product, with a modern user interface and new features.

In addition to all the changes, the most popular features of CT-ART and other training programs were also added to Peshk@. Taking Advantage of the Internet Peshk@ is the first ChessOK training program that takes advantage of the Internet. The basic package will be available both on DVD and as a download. It comes with one training course, but users can browse a list of other available courses from inside the program. The list is automatically updated when new courses are released. Users will be allowed to try out new courses before they buy them. Since they are presented through Peshk@ there is no need to install a new program. The trial versions will allow you to make a more informed decision about buying or not. If you decide to buy, the purchase only requires a few mouse clicks and you will be able to start using the new course within minutes.

Peshk@ is the next generation of ChessOK’s training programs.

This design allows users to quickly build a library of courses that address those areas that need the most improvement.

There are several interesting ideas in development with regards to new courses for specific rating ranges, etc. As is usual with ChessOK, I’m sure that they will listen closely to their customers when it comes to developing material for Peshk@.

Improvements Based on User Feedback

The improvements in Peshk@ compared to older ChessOK training programs are to a large extent based on feedback from users. Although previous programs have been very successful, users have pointed out several important opportunities for improvement. Many of those have been incorporated into Peshk@. Here are some examples:

1. Improved user interface. Peshk@ is based on a modern user interface that is similar to Office 2007, but much simpler. Rybka Aquarium users will also feel right at home with the “ribbon” user interface. Note that you can minimize the ribbon by double-clicking on one of the tabs in order to maximize the working area. This can be helpful for users with low-resolution screens.
2. Improved piece and board graphic. Peshk@ comes with a nice selection of boards and piece sets. The pieces are vector based so they look smooth at any size. Board themes and piece sets are interchangeable between Peshk@ and Rybka Aquarium.
3. Consistency across different training program. This is solved by Peshk@. Instead of creating a different program for each training course, Peshk@ can handle multiple courses as described below.
4. Vista UAC compatibility. Peshk@ is fully compatible with Windows Vista UAC and doesn’t need administrative rights to run.
5. Auto-update and an option to download courses from the Internet. Both of these features are built into Peshk@. Note that Internet access is only required while you are checking for and downloading new courses. Otherwise everything is done locally; so for training, Peshk@ works in the same way as previous ChessOk training programs.

One Program Many Training Courses

One of the more interesting features of Peshk@ is that it is module based. This means that many different training courses will be available and can be plugged into Peshk@.

The training courses in previous ChessOK training programs are of very high quality and ChessOK worked closely with several chess schools and experienced trainers to develop the training regimen. Many of the existing courses will also be available for Peshk@.

One of the advantages of the ChessOK training courses is that they squeeze as much value as possible out of each exercise. As an example, the user must find all important moves in a combination, not just the first one. Sometimes he may even be required to find the correct continuation against different defending moves. If he is in trouble, Peshk@ will help put him on the right track using different methods without actually revealing the correct moves.

	The “Courses” button in the ribbon at the top of the application window presents a list of available courses in the “Course Browser,” which is shown in the image below.
The “Courses” button displays the available training courses.

You can use the buttons at the top of the window to filter the list, so you only see the courses that you are interested in. The courses are displayed in a configurable multi-level list. In the example above I have placed rank or difficulty at the top of the hierarchy. The next level shows two categories: “Local” and “Online.” The local courses are already available on your computer. They were either part of the Peshk@ package or you may have downloaded them separately. The Online list shows additional courses that are available for download. If you click one of the items in the Online list, you are presented with a purchase link or a download link if it’s a demo.

The “Course Browser” shows local and Online courses.

	Before you can start using the Online resources you must register. Click the “Go online” button at the bottom of the course browser window.
Additional courses and demos can be downloaded.

If you are already registered at the Chess Resource Server (e.g., through the ChessOK Downloader) you can enter your login and password here. Otherwise click the “Register now!” link to register. After you log in the “Top up balance” button replaces the “Go online” button at the bottom of the course browser window.

In case you are planning to buy a new course, click this button to add the required amount to your account. After that you can purchase the course in Peshk@ and it will be automatically downloaded and installed.

Starting Peshk@ for the first time The first time you start Peshk@ you are asked to create a profile with your name and estimated Elo rating. In this example, I’ll register a new user by the name of John with an estimated rating of 800. The reason why you must create a profile is that Pehsk@ can keep track of several user profiles. Each user’s performance is recorded and the statistics are available for viewing. This makes the program ideal for use by trainers, schools, and chess clubs.

It’s important that you enter a realistic rating, as it is updated after each exercise to reflect your progress. If you are unsure about your rating, it’s better to start too low than too high. Your rating will increase to the appropriate level once you have solved a sufficient number of exercises. After that the rating changes will tell you how fast you are improving.

Some of the training courses are designed specifically for lower rated players. If you enter a rating that is too high, you may be surprised if it doesn’t increase when you solve the exercises intended for much lower rated players. The reason is the same as when one player beats a much lower rated player in a tournament. He doesn’t gain any rating points. But in case he loses, his rating decreases.

Finally, don’t expect the rating level to be directly comparable to other rating systems; of course you can compare your rating to others who are also using Peshk@.

Different Approaches to Training

Peshk@ uses the same basic approach as most ChessOK tutorial programs. It offers four different methods to teach and reinforce the material:

• Learn (theory): In this mode a new topic is introduced via a narrative and examples that the user can play through on the screen. When available, this should be your starting point for each new topic.
• Learn (practice): When you select this mode you are given exercises to solve from the selected topic. The program keeps track of your practice results.
• Play: In this mode you can play against the built-in chess engine, starting from any position on the board.
• Test: Here you can select various test parameters. The program keeps track of your test performance.

These methods correspond to the first three buttons in the Home tab as shown in the image below. Additionally, you can switch between theory and practice in learn mode using the course navigator.

The Course Navigator The course navigator serves as an outline for the training regimen by breaking it down into manageable sections and providing a framework for studying. It is displayed in the working area, but you can switch it on and off with the click of a button. The navigator allows the user to select a lesson for study or practice. The text at the top of the pane shows that “The 1st Stage of Studies” is the currently selected course. Below that, the table of contents for this course is displayed. It is divided into sections, two of which are currently visible, “Mate in 2″ and “Sacrifice material.” Each section is further broken down into several subsections or lessons. The user has selected the “Queen sacrifice” lesson in the “Sacrifice material” section. The “Practice” button at the bottom of the image is highlighted by default. If the course contains theoretical sections, the “Theory” button is also enabled, allowing you to study the theoretical part of the course. As mentioned above you can switch the course navigator on and off as you like. Just click the “Navigator” button in the “Tools” tab to toggle the display of the navigator pane.

The course navigator.

Here the “Navigator” button is highlighted, which means that the course navigator pane is displayed. Click the button to switch it off. By default, the course navigator is displayed when learning mode is active, but not in play or test modes.

Learn Mode Learn mode lets you study the topics of the course both through theory and practice. The theoretical lessons use specific examples, graphic illustrations and verbal explanations. Several positions, often from real games, are used to show how the theoretical material works in practice. When in learn mode you can switch to practice mode by clicking the “Practice” button in the course navigator pane. You are then immediately presented with the first exercise as shown in the next screenshot. At the top of the image there is a slider with one notch for each exercise. It moves automatically as you go through the exercises. You can also drag the slider left or right with the mouse.

Peshk@ uses the slider to let you keep track of the exercises you have competed. The following screenshot shows what the slider might look like after you have completed some of the exercises.

The leftmost exercise was solved successfully so it is shown in olive color. If you failed to solve an exercise, it is shown in orange color. The light-gray color shows exercises that you have not yet tried to solve.

Learn mode allows you skip an exercise and then come back to it later using the slider. Few users will be able to solve all the exercises at first, so don’t hesitate to skip exercises and solve them later.

The chessboard is below the slider. The small white square in the lower left corner of the board shows that it is White’s move. The buttons below the board are disabled until you have finished the exercise. Then you can use the buttons to play through the moves.

You should keep an eye on the status bar at the bottom of the window, because it shows several fields with useful information. Going from left to right:

• Learn mode. This field displays the current mode.
• Task 1 of 11. The first number “1″ shows that you are currently working on task number 1 and “11″ tells us the total number of tasks or exercises.
• Score 0 of 30. The first number keeps track of the score for the current task. The second number shows the maximum number of points for the task (30 in this case).
• Attempts 0. This field keeps count of how many attempts you have made to find the correct move in the current position. The penalty increases every time you make a wrong move.
• Time spent 00:00:19. Here you can see how much time you have spent on the current task; 19 seconds in this example.
• Task Elo: 1500. Each exercise has an Elo rating attached to it based on its difficulty. This field is not visible in the image above.

Finally there is a task status field (not shown) that displays the status of the current task, such as whose move it is and if the task is completed. When you find the correct move, the program responds and then asks you for your next move. Sometimes there is more than one good move in a position and you will be asked to consider other moves besides the one you chose. If you don’t play the correct move, the program will guide you by highlighting the most important pieces and using arrows to draw attention to key aspects of the position, as shown in the diagram below: If you still don’t find the correct move, the piece that you are supposed to move will blink. If you can’t find the correct move after that, the program will make one or more moves for both sides and resume the exercise from there.

It’s also possible to ask Peshk@ to give you a hint by clicking the “Task Hint” button in the “Help” tab. After solving an exercise you can play through the variations on the board. This is recommended, because there are sometimes additional variations given that were not played, plus it helps to review the solution.

Test Mode

The main difference between learn mode and test mode is that the exercises are randomly selected and presented in varying order. You also have greater control over which exercises are included in the test. You can even set up a test that covers exercises from the whole course instead of a single lesson.

Test mode is started by clicking the “Test” button on the “Home” tab. There are several parameters that the user can set before a test begins, as shown in this screenshot. In the “Scope” pane you can either limit the test to the current lesson, as I have done here, or the whole course. The “Task selection” pane defines which tasks from the selected scope are included in the test. “Unsolved” limits the test to tasks that you haven’t solved. If you don’t want to exclude any tasks from the scope, select “All.” By selecting “Erroneous,” you can create a test consisting of tasks that you failed to solve. You can also limit the test to tasks that are above a certain Elo rating. This option can be helpful if the simplest exercises are too easy for you. Finally you can decide the number of tasks in the test by using the “Number of tasks” slider. I have selected ten tasks. When you are ready, just press the “Start test” button.

Statistics As you progress with Peshk@ and complete more tests, the program evaluates your rating changes based on your performance. You must realize that it is the rating changes that matter most, but not the actual rating level. This feature is helpful to trainers, who can use it to compare the performance of their students. Each column on the bar graph below corresponds to one exercise. Basically, if you correctly solve an exercise, without any clues from the program, then your rating will increase. If you fail to solve it, your rating will decrease. If you need help from the program to solve an exercise, you will receive penalty points. In this case your rating change depends on the number of penalty points.

In this column I have given a quick overview of Peshk@. Users of current ChessOK training programs were given some insight into the differences between Peshk@ and previous training programs and new users got a taste of what it is like to work with Peshk@.

Since I’m working with a beta version, readers must keep in mind that some of the screenshots and descriptions I have given above may change before the final release.

Dadi Jonsson

The 5th traditional TOP GM’s tournament “Mtel Masters” will take part in Sofia, Bulgaria from May 13th to 23rd.
Average ELO is 2755. It is 21st FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Double round robin.
Prize fond is 300,000 euro.

All rounds start at 12.00 GMT
ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Veselin Topalov (2812) (BUL) brMagnus Carlsen (2770) (NOR) brVassily Ivanchuk (2746) (UKR) brAlexei Shirov (2745) (ESP) brWang Yue (2738) (CHN) brLenier Dominguez (2721) (CUB)

Rapid Chess match between Azerbaijan team and team of FIDE World will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan from May 7th to 9th.
Event system: Scheveningen.

Members of Azerbaijan team: Teimour Radjabov (2756), Vugar Gashimov (2730), Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (2725), Gadir Guseinov (2659) and Rauf Mamedov (2645, reserve player).
Average ELO is 2703.

Members of FIDE World team: World Champion Viswanathan Anand (2783, IND), Vladimir Kramnik (2759, RUS), Alexei Shirov (2745. ESP) and Sergey Karjakin (2721, UKR).
Average ELO is 2752.

Time control: 25 minutes per game.
Start of the games: 7th May - 14.00 GMT; 8th and 9th May - 12.00 GMT.

ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Games: Round 1 [ PGN], Round 2 [ PGN]

Total score after 1sr day: 3½ - 4½

The traditional tournament of Bosna chess club will take part in Saraevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina from May 7th to 18th.
Number of players: 6.
Average ELO is 2690. It is 19th FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Double round robin.

ChessOK will analyze all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium.

Movsesian Sergei (2747) (SVK) brWang Hao (2696) (CHN) brEljanov Pavel (2693) (UKR) brHarikrishna Pentala (2686) (IND) brSokolov Ivan (2669) (BIH) brPredojevic Borki (2652) (BIH)

The 4th FIDE Grand Prix tournament will take part in Nalchik, Russia from April 14th to 30th.
Number of players: 14.
Average ELO is 2725. It is 20th FIDE tournament category.
Tournament format: Round robirn.
Time control: 2 hour for 40 moves + 1 hour to 20 moves + 15 min and 30 sec/move.
ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

Levon Aronian (2754) (ARM) brPeter Leko (2751) (HUN) brAlexander Grischuk (2748) (RUS) brVassily Ivanchuk (2746) (UKR) brBoris Gelfand (2733) (ISR) brEtienne Bacrot (2728) (FRA) brPetr Svidler (2726) (RUS) brShakhriyar Mamedyarov (2725) (AZE) brSergey Karjakin (2721) (UKR) brEvgeny Alekseev (2715) (RUS) brGata Kamsky (2725) (USA) brVladimir Akopian (2696) (ARM) brRustam Kasimdzhanov (2695) (UZB) brPavel Eljanov (2693) (UKR)

Russian Team Cup as usual will take part in Dagomys, Russia from April 4th to 11th.
There are 8 teams in Premier-League. Each team consists of 6 regular and 2 reserve players.
Tournament format: Round-Robin (7 rounds).
Average ratings of the teams: Ural (2701), Economist-SGSEU - 1 (2699), Tomsk-400 (2685), SPbChFed (2684), ShSM-64 (2672), TPS (2645), Eurasia-Logistic (2566), M.Chigorin CC (2459).
List of team players you can find below.
ChessOK will broadcast the most interesting games of this tournament.

Round 1 - 4th Apr.
Ural - Tomsk-400 3 - 3
M.Chigorin CC - TPS 1½ - 4½
Eurasia-Logistic - ShSM-64 2 - 4
SPbChFed - Economist-SGSEU - 1 2½ - 3½

Round 1 All games

Round 2 LIVE!

Round 3 LIVE!

The annual computer chess tournament was held this weekend on Internet Chess Club.

The Rybka team was using a cluster of 9 computers working in parallel for the event. As Rybka doesn’t support cluster splitting yet, a special Rybka version was created for this purpose.

Operator: Nick Carlin
Cluster implementation: Lukas Cimiotti
Rybka engine: Vasik Rajlich, Larry Kaufman
Opening book: Jeroen Noomen’s Rybka Aquarium opening book
Interface: Chess Assistant 10

View all games

In this position from DIEP - Rybka game Rybka clearly sees that she wins the ending giving the rook away with 36…Rxf3! move. So she went to it several moves before.


Rybka hardware
Four octal machines (2 Skulltrail’s @ 4 and 3.8 GHz, 1 Xeon X5460 @ 3.8 GHz, 1 x Xeon X5450 @3.6 GHz) and 5 Nehalem Quads (Core i7 920 3.9 - 4.1 GHz), so 52 cores.
The octal machines have 8 GB of RAM each, and 6 GB for the Nehalems.

Rybka won both tournaments (main and blitz)
She scored 7.5 out of 9 in the main tournament (1 draw and 1 technical defeat in a totally won position).
The blitz score was 7 out of 7.

Download games.

The result is hard to imagine: 1 draw and 15 wins in 16 games.

This high result couldn’t be possible without the new Rybka Aquarium opening book, that has recently become available for purchase.
The book is designed for Aquarium GUI, but later it will be possible to use it with Chess Assistant 10 (after a patch is released) and with any other GUI (via a free UCI adapter that will be released this week).

Official site of the tournament is http://www.cctchess.com/

You may find the discussion of the tournament on the Rybka forum:
http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=10299
http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=10314

> bomb-blast!

The 18th traditional TopGM’s blindfold and rapid tournament in Nice, France will take part from Mar 14th to 26th.
Players: V. Topalov (BUL, 2796), World Champion V. Anand (IND, 2791), V. Ivanchuk (UKR, 2779), M. Carlsen (NOR, 2776), A. Morozevich (RUS, 2771), T. Radjabov (AZE, 2761), World Exchampion V. Kramnik (RUS, 2759), P. Leko (HUN, 2751), L. Aronian (ARM, 2750), Wang Yue (CHN, 2739), G. Kamsky (USA, 2725), S. Karjakin (UKR, 2706).
Tournament format: Round robin..
Prize fond: 216,000 Euros.
Average ELO is 2759. It is 20th FIDE tournament category.
All rounds start at 14:30 GMT.
ChessOK is going to broadcast all games of this tournament with Rybka 3 Aquarium commentary.

The first professional opening book for Rybka Aquarium has been released. The author is non other than Jeroen Noomen, a very experienced and highly regarded opening book author. Jeroen is a member of the Rybka team and the author of the Rybka’s private opening book which is used in its most important competitions, including the World Computer Chess Championship.

The release of the Aquarium opening book coincides with release 3.1.0 of Aquarium which adds support for i-Books as described in last month’s column. I will dedicate this month’s column to the new opening book, but it also comes with an i-Book that helps users to navigate the opening book and examine the variations. We’ll have a book at the i-Book and the Aquarium opening book later in this article, but we’ll start with an interview with the author, Jeroen Noomen. Q(1): You have been involved in computer chess for a long time and you have been writing opening books for chess computers and chess engines since 1989. What are the major changes that have occurred during that time from the book author’s perspective?

The i-Book provides a convenient way of browsing the Aquarium book.

Jeroen: My first opening book for a commercial chess program was the one I created for Mephisto Polgar. That was still in my student’s time. Shortly after that I became an employee at Hegener+Glaser, the producers of Mephisto programs. Next projects were the books for Mephisto MM V, the Milano and the Vancouver. Basically you didn’t have the great book tools available that we have now. A spartanic editor was the best I could get and even a text editor was used in some cases! Furthermore chess programs were still miles away from GM level, which meant that printed opening books and GM games were the only reliable sources. Nowadays computer games make up for 90% of the book, which is logical looking at their imposing 3000+ strength. The biggest change, I would say, is the switch from hand typed opening books to automatically generated books. Everybody can make a big book by importing a large number of games into a book file. In the old days PCs were rare, but now we cannot live without them. The software that has been developed in the past 5-10 years is a blessing for book authors; many painstaking efforts in the 1990s have been replaced by automatic tools. Q(2): Chess strength is one of the factors that differentiate the Rybka team members from its competitors. Do you feel that your understanding of chess helps you as an opening book author? Considering the strength of Rybka, how would it affect your methods of working if you were a mere beginner at chess?

Jeroen Noomen.

Jeroen: Absolutely. Openings have always been my favorite aspect of the game, already since my 8th birthday, when I learned the game of chess. For some reason I was never able to crack the 2200 Elo barrier, as a result of which I decided to give up playing chess myself in favor of studying and analysing opening lines. When I stopped playing I had around 2190 Elo, which is far away from a decent IM level, but it is still coming in handy to understand what is going on in a game of chess. In quite many positions computer programs still do not have a clue what is going on and in such cases human knowledge is a strong factor. From time to time you have to feed the right moves to the program and guide it through the “mine fields” to avoid a disaster . If I were only a beginner, I think that I would rely solely on the computer’s evaluation and the book statistics, which is rather dangerous. I always say: “Computer evaluations and statistics make people stop thinking for themselves.” It is always good to have a critical opinion and don’t take everything that the machine suggests for granted.

Q(3): Your first opening books were targeted at one special chess computer or chess engine. How has this changed over time and what are the target groups for the Aquarium opening book?

Jeroen: That is correct. My first books were specially designed for the Mephisto programs, after that I made books for Rebel, Pro Deo and Chess Tiger. They were mainly supporting the strengths and weaknesses of the chess program in question. Besides, these books were rather small when you compare them with the opening books being made today. With my last two books I am targeting a larger audience. Of course the books are meant to give Rybka a boost in tournaments and Elo lists, but that is not the only target. Fortunately Rybka is so strong, that she can play a wide variety of opening lines without looking silly. Even gambits are played rather well, as well as dynamic positions. Therefore my Rybka books could be much wider and deeper than my previous books. As theory is developing rapidly and computer games have become a major factor, my idea was to combine GM games and computer games and thus make this book interesting for a wide public: IMs, GMs, correspondence players, strong tournament players and people interested in opening theory or engine-engine matches.

Jeroen testing his opening ideas against Vasik Rajlich, Rybka’s author.

Q(4): Nowadays your opening books are based on both grandmaster games and games played by strong chess engines. Can you somehow compare the progress being made in opening theory in these two categories?

Jeroen: In my opinion the progress made in the computer area is much faster than in GM games. This is no surprise, as each day thousands of computer games are being played, opposed to only a few top GM games. Besides, in computer games everything is tried, while GMs are more cautious in their opening choice. On the other hand I regard each top GM game as interesting for my book, while with engine games you have to be more critical. It is quite common that there are a lot of non-interesting lines being played in the computer scene and you should prevent a lot of this stuff from entering your book. I am sure no serious player is really interested in the development of 1.a3 or 1.c3.