The long-awaited Rybka 4 is finally scheduled for release! Sign up now for pre-order and enjoy free shipping as well as a free gift of your choice at checkout!
Scheduled Ship Date by Wholesale Chess: May 31, 2010
Rybka: World Chess Champion
Rybka has been the uncontested number one in computer chess for years. Since its great breakthrough in 2006, the program has won one world title after the other.
What Makes Rybka 4 Better?
To help guarantee strength and continued success, the Rybka team gathered around programmer Vasik Rajlich in developing a new version which is even better! To start, Rybka 4 plays more aggressively and more tactically than ever before. During the last two years the engine has been improved in almost all areas. One major theme has been the understanding of the attack on the king. The new Rybka 4 is in this case more precise and reliable than Rybka 3. The search function has also been enhanced to operate more quickly and efficiently and the evaluation function delivers even more spot-on judgments. Rybka 4 is delivered with the new user-friendly Fritz 12 interface and contains a database of 1.5 million games and includes CLASSIC membership for playchess.com for one year.
National Master Kayden Troff wrote the following review of Dinosaur Chess by Convekta:
Dinosaur Chess Software
This product is tons of fun for beginning chess students! My parents never did teach me how to play chess. I watched my dad and brothers play when I was two and learned how all of the pieces moved through watching them. This is probably not normal and when my little sister wanted to learn, we used this chess software to help her learn chess and to have fun at the same time.
My little sister is four and will sit at the computer next to my computer and have her “chess time” just like me. She sees me study everyday and in the evenings before I go to bed and she wants to do what she sees her older brother doing. This chess software is very easy to use even for a child.
How the Software Works
So this is how it works: You create a user id so that you can stop playing at anytime and then return to work on the software later on. This is important because there are lots of lessons and activities and this makes it so that you don’t have to go through and solve the entire thing in one turn. It is sometimes annoying when you purchase an older video game with Wii points like Super Mario Brothers 2 and you have to complete the whole game in its entirety without any chance to save the game. My dad and little sister solved Super Mario Brothers 2 recently, but they spent hours doing it and they would have to leave the Wii running overnight so that it wouldn’t erase their progress. This software is updated so it does save your progress.
For your user id you can choose to be a boy dinosaur or girl dinosaur. This is really cool for my little sister because she can be the dinosaur in a pink dress and lipstick. As you might guess she gave her girl dinosaur the same name as hers.
She then will work on the training. This consists of learning about the chess board set up and names of the pieces and then about each of the chess pieces and how they move. There is a short amount of instructions given for each mini-lesson along with the Scottish teacher dinosaur that will show examples on the chess board during the instructions. You can choose from several different styles of chess pieces and my sister chose the chess pieces with the funny faces on them. Music plays the entire time that you use this software and it seems fun and upbeat. The lessons even include some of the tougher chess concepts like castling, en passant and promotion of your pawns.
When the dinosaur teacher asks a question then the student has a chance to answer the question by clicking on the chess piece or square on the chess board. If you get the question correct then it’s usually accompanied by a loud explosion of the piece or the square and the teacher congratulates you and tells you that you got the right answer. At the end of each mini lesson there is an activity to reinforce the concepts that were being taught. Usually the mini activity/game at the end of the lesson involves “Raptor” dinosaurs slowly chasing around the chess board while you try to move your Rooks, or Knights or Bishops correctly to capture the candy, ice cream or cookies that appear on the chessboard.
Let me stop for a minute here and say that these games are good to learn the concepts but they can be pretty stressful for a little kid when the “Raptor” dinosaur catches them and the mini game resets. My little sister would get pretty stressed out and ask for assistance when she was younger because these dinosaurs would freak her out. You also have to be old enough to be able to use a mouse and a cursor to use this software.
After you complete a mini-game at the end of each lesson then the Scottish dinosaur teacher does a little dance and plays his bagpipes for you, and your character grows a little bigger each time. My little sister likes it when her dinosaur grows bigger. This is also important for another part of the game. There is a Dinosaur Fight part of the game that really has nothing to do with chess. You can pick different dinosaurs to fight against. You then get to Punch, Kick or Burp your opponent off of the board. It’s kind of annoying but little kids seem to like it and you can’t be successful unless you grow your dinosaur bigger through completing the lessons and the mini-games.
You also can challenge the dinosaurs to a game of chess. These dinosaurs have baseball caps, headphones and other things that make them look like cool dinosaurs. Each of the chess games range from easy to hard depending on the dinosaur that you challenge. Except for T-Rex, all of the other chess games don’t start like a normal chess game. Some of the pieces are off the board. Less and less pieces are missing as you challenge tougher dinosaur opponents and if you challenge the T-Rex then all of the pieces are there on both sides of the board. The T-Rex battle/chess game is still quite easy since it misses most of your threats and plays at a very low level.
There is a page that you can view within this software that has all the dinosaurs that you have beaten, or all the lessons that you have completed and as you do more of this then this number grows. These dinosaurs and pieces bounce around in their boxes and your child can use this to track their progress in a fun way.
I should mention that this Convekta product often asks for the product key every month or so. This can be annoying, but you’ll want to keep it handy and not lose it so that your child can use this software.
This truly is a kids teaching software program for absolute beginners and for ages 4-6 unless your child is really good with the computer. It is a fun way to learn how to play chess! It may seem like it is more meant for boys, but my little sister really liked it too especially because she could be a girl dinosaur.
Another great addition to the Power Play chess software series by Chessbase was released this week. Power Play 13 by Daniel King focuses on ‘The Squeeze’.
Power Play 13
What is the Squeeze?
It’s simple in theory: Take control of the game and move forward by depriving your opponent of counter play and slowly squeeze the life out of your opponent. The Art of War summarizes the idea of the squeeze well: “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” This DVD will help you to recognize when a squeeze is possible and how to execute it.
Throughout this program, you’ll be able to test your understanding of the subjects being taught through special selected positions designed to help you improve. The Power Play series is suitable for anyone looking to improve their chess, but also provides ready-made lessons and exercises for a trainer. Video running time: 5 hours.
Grandmaster Daniel King has been a professional chess player for more than 20 years. During that time he has represented his country on many occasions, including an historic match victory over the Soviet Union in Reykjavik, 1990. At the same time he has distinguished himself as a coach, helping many of England’s younger generation to achieve their potential. Besides his chess career, he has built up a reputation as a commentator on television, radio and the internet. He is also an award-winning author of more than 15 books.
National Master Kayden Troff wrote the following review of Chess Tactics for Beginners:
Chess Tactics for Beginners
Don’t be fooled by the name!! This chess software isn’t just for beginners, but it is great for beginners all the way up to about a 1200 level! It was made by Russian chess coaches, and it is very easy to use. My brothers and I all teach private chess lessons each week and one of the things that we require each one of our students to get is this software. We have them do a certain number of problems from it every day and it really helps!
When my family first bought this software we had to buy it from England because it wasn’t available in the United States and we had to pay a lot more for it than what Wholesale Chess.com sells it for. We have bought a lot of chess software but the thing I really like about this software is that you don’t have to flip to the back of a chess book to see the answer, but you can see it right there.
The Chess Tactics is Great for Beginners
The other thing I like is that if you get one wrong move, it gives you the chance to correct that move instead of getting the whole problem wrong. With a book, you have already seen the answer so you have no way to fix your mistake on your own. The software will let you try two or three times before you get a “frowny face” for a wrong answer and you will still get points towards the finishing the problem if you guess it right on your second or third try. This is really great for beginner and intermediate students who may make lots of mistakes and get frustrated with the problem. They don’t need to feel like they have no success. If you get lots of chances then it suddenly makes things seem not so hard.
Chess Tactics Progresses with You
Another great thing about this software is that it starts out with easy “mate in one” problems and then progresses to “win a Knight in one move” problems and “win a Bishop in one move” and then a Rook and a Queen until you get to “mate in two” problems and “win a Knight in two moves” etc. By the time that you actually get into it you don’t even realize that the problems are getting a little harder each time because it starts easy and builds, and before you know it you’re to the end of the 1200 or 1300 problems and you have learned a ton! Some people say that all you learn is pattern recognition when you solve puzzles and this may be true in a way, but to look for it more in your games and you see it more because you are used to seeing it.
Chess Tactics Measures Your Performance
One of the other things I like about this software is that it gives you an ELO rating on the strength of your performance. This helps to see how you are improving and getting better. Also, you can have lots of different usernames so everyone in your family can have their own username with their own rating and you can even have more than one username of your own so that you can compare how you did vs. how you are doing now on the same problems.
Chess Tactics has Varying Playing Modes
When you are really ready to take it up a notch then you can switch from practice mode to test mode. In test mode you can specify a range of problems that you want to “test on”. So if you are feeling particularly smart then you can set the range for the “mate in three” problems or the three move problems to win material. And then the test mode will throw these problems at you at random and you’ll have to figure out whether it is a mate problem or a win material problem. You can also say how many problems that you want to test on. So if you only want to do ten problems then you set your test at ten. If you want to do 50 or 100 then you get to choose. Another cool feature is that you can specify the test for the chess puzzles that you missed and it will put these together and throw them at you again.
Chess Tactics Saves Current Games
When you just do tons of problems in practice mode the software will track which problems you have completed and you can shut it off and it will resume where you left off the next day. It also tracks your percentage of correct answers and this is important so that you can see if you are getting the correct answer 80% of the time or 90% of the time or 50% of the time.
How I Use Chess Tactics for Training
So let me tell you a couple of ways that we use it as a trainer to give you some ideas of how it will strengthen your chess. One of my first chess teachers had my brothers and I just work through all 1300 problems and track how long it took us to do it. So for example: we might do fifty problems a day and it might take 60 days for us to complete the entire thing. Then he would have us go through it again and expect us to be able to do the entire thing in half of the time (or 30 days). We would then go through it again and try to cut it down to 15 days and by this time we would be tracking our progress in hours for those 15 days. My older brother Jeremy and I would race each other on two computers as we would try to cut our time and we were able to cut our time to 8 hours for the entire thing with a 90% accuracy rate.
My dad would also track my progress in another way. I would create a new user id each morning and then test out on a certain section of 50 problems. I would always try to get 85-90% on my test and my dad would check up on this when he got home from work. This allowed me to focus on specific tactics and to really work hard to get a good percentage each day.
Volume 33 in International Grandmaster Roman Dzindzichashvilis Forum series combines what used to be 4 VHS tape lessons. Taken together, they constitute a practical repertoire for the 1. e4 player, with the defenses and main-lines most likely to be encountered in actual play, although players who wish a comprehensive system will have to fill in the gaps with more of his Chess DVDs or a generic reference book on the openings, since Roman spends more time on the main lines in order to deepen a students preparation for the ensuing middlegames.
Against the Sicilian, Roman advocates 1.e4 c5 2.Nc3 Nc6 3.f4 g6 4.Nf3 Bg7 5.Bb5, a variation of the Grand Prix attack with the option either of a direct attack on Blacks King or positional play on the Queenside. Roman’s suggestions against the French, Caro-Kann, Alekhines, and Pirc are a hodgepodge of lines which are nonetheless really effective :1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.e5 c5 and now 5.Bd2 against the French Winawer1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. exd cxd 4.c4the Panov-Botvinnik Attack against the Caro-Kann 1.e4 Nf6 2.e5 Nd5 3.c4 Nb6 4.c5 Nd5 5.Nc3 the Two Pawns Attack against Alekhines Defense. And against the Pirc, a White Be3 and h3 setup.
The last two DVDs examine the main line Two Knights Defense after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 4.d4 exd4 5.e5 and the Giuoco Piano after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.c3 Nf6 5.d4 exd4 6.cxd Bb5 7.Bd2an innocuous line into which Roman has injected some venomous ideas. Finally, Roman proposes reaching these main lines via a Scotch Gambit move order, where Black has to run a gauntlet of traps only to reach the safe haven of the Two Knights or Giuoco Piano, where Roman has already shown how White can achieve a lasting positional advantage.
As might be expected, the insights of a top-flight International Grandmaster on lines which he has used against the best players in the world outweigh the best efforts of most other makers of chess videos. And yet, there have been some misinformed and malicious reviews which have spread onto all the search engines, which make it difficult to decide whether or not to purchase them.
As I see it, Roman’s DVDs have some real problems in presentation despite their excellent content. Often the packaging fails fully to disclose which lines are analyzed, frustrating to someone wishing to focus on their favorite systems, and the production values verge on the abysmal: lighting and sound are amateurish, and the demonstration boards (comically awful on the earlier videos) are improved somewhat on the later ones, only to be plagued with the occasional error most frustratingly yet, flipping the board inappropriately to show the Black side of a White opening system.
Now, to me that doesn’t matter, since while watching any chess videos, I follow the moves on an actual chess board. Chess memory and thinking are a matter of physical memory proprioception much more than visual memory, as studies since Alfred Binets pioneering work on human intelligence at the turn of the last century have shown. You can read more in Diego Rasskin-Gutmans Chess Metaphors (MIT: 2009) if you’re interested in this topic.
I’m a National Master and I’m largely self taught from chess books; however, I get a lot from watching these videos again and again. Roman inculcates above all a way of thinking about the position at hand, and I need constant reinforcement to get rid of all my bad habits. I have even found Romans voice guiding me in completely unfamiliar situations in actual play, his common sense enabling me to find the underlying positional thread amid the distracting thicket of tactical possibilities.
I don’t usually write reviews of products I buy, I have a day job and chess is a hobby I pursue at the amateur level, despite some intermittent success and the occasional victory over a titled player. Frankly, as a tournament player Id rather you didn’t purchase Romans DVDs, but a sense of justice and gratitude compels me to answer the unfair reviews I encounter whenever I do a search on Roman’s latest DVDs, and set the record straight as best I can.
This is a customer review written by Eric form San Diego. Thanks Eric!
The following is an excerpt from an article titled “Chess is not Only about Winning” by Natalia Pogonina:
Each chess player has 5 main character attributes:
1) Chess skills – also referred to as “chess class”.There is even a saying in Russia – “you can’t ruin your class through drinking”. Smile For example, a master is supposed to remember how to play the Philidor’s position even if he’s heavily drunk, sick and almost asleep.
2) Chess shape – that is your current chess conditioning. For example, you might be a great player, but if you haven’t had practice lately, you may easily forget how to play some technical positions, have problems recalling moves in the opening, calculate slowly, or just blunder.
3) Physical shape – an essential component of success. Chess games usually last for a few hours, so it’s very important to be fit. Tiredness or illness may easily cost you the full point.
4) Mental shape – that is how well your brain is operating at the moment. Sometimes it seems that everything is great: you are feeling well, your chess preparation and skills are excellent, you have been performing well in chess – and then you just find out that today your head feels like having a holiday. It doesn’t feel like doing any calculation at all, so you have to rely on your intuition only.
5) Psychological shape – if you’re feeling down, unconfident, have no energy, are not motivated enough, tired of playing chess, etc., then chances are that you will perform much worse than you could have done otherwise.
The difference between the elite players (Anand, Topalov, Kramnik, Carlsen, etc.) and the rest is that the former can afford to play selectively (since their earnings are high enough), and at times when their 5 main attributes are at the top levels. “Regular” GMs are deprived of the luxury and have to travel from one event to another to make a living. Amateurs are at the worst possible situation: they either have to play on weekends, in the evening, or during a vacation. Naturally, that leaves hardly any choice and opportunity for maneuvering.
You can find all sorts of software that will help strengthen your chess skills right here at Wholesale Chess. Check out our chess software selection to start.
If you’re looking for top-notch training material from one of the best in chess history, you should start with the famous Power Play series by Daniel King. Another amazing Chessbase product, the Power Play DVD series extends through 12 different DVDs offering instruction on the basics, tactics, strategies, and in-depth details into your chess game.
Grandmaster Daniel King was born in 1963 in London England. He has played chess professionally for more than 20 years, achieving great success for England. During that time he has represented his country on many occasions, including an historic match victory over the Soviet Union in Reykjavik, 1990. At the same time he has distinguished himself as a coach, helping many of England’s younger generation to achieve their potential. Besides his chess career, he has built up a reputation as a commentator on television, radio and the internet. He is also an award-winning author of more than 15 books.
The Power Play series is suitable for anyone looking to improve their chess, but also provides ready-made lessons and exercises for a trainer.
Looking for more information on Daniel King’s Power Play series? Stop by and visit the Wholesale Chess chess software collection – The Power Play Series.
