For Fritz users who are slightly lost

peterk1

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I've had Fritz for almost 10 years or so (still using version 6). I have a love/hate relationship with this thing. I use it in the obvious fashion, keeping a database of my games and doing quick analysis after each tournament but I've always had tons of questions about it that I've never had answered (I've been wondering for ages how to get numeric evaluations stored in my analysis instead of the stupid +/- symbols which I despise).

I just stumbled onto a treasure trove of PDFs by one of the Chessbase employees that explains everything in a user-friendly manner. It's =ALMOST= tempting enough to make me try a game against Fritz again one of these evenings.

http://www.chesscafe.com/zip/cbcafe.zip

I used to hate the analysis because the default is to report a variation when a move scoring more than .05 of a pawn is found. The result of that is Fritz sticking all sorts of alternate moves in that don't really seem much better at all. Finally, I've learned that .35 of a pawn is a much better setting for average players.

Incidentally, this guy says that a setting of 5 seconds a move for analysis is ridiculously short and not worthwhile, but I've been using it for ages that way and it does the job and seems to find everything meaningful. Does anyone do overnight analysis like they suggest, or do you do quickies like I do?
 
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kcdusk

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I used to hate the analysis because the default is to report a variation when a move scoring more that .05 of a pawn is found. The result of that is Fritz sticking all sorts of alternate moves in that don't really seem much better at all. Finally, I've learned that .35 of a pawn is a much better setting for average players.

Incidentally, this guy says that a setting of 5 seconds a move for analysis is ridiculously short and not worthwhile, but I've been using it for ages that way and it does the job and seems to find everything meaningful. Does anyone do overnight analysis like they suggest, or do you do quickies like I do?
1. I've heard that Fritz can give many variations even with small (.05 pawn) differences.

2. I use Chessmaster. I used to review games at 1minute per move. So, it'd take about an hour or so to analyse. Then i switched to the default 10 seconds per move, to save time, and i figured Chessmaster at 10 seconds is likely to pick up almost anything that would be "relevant" to me. Longer time just meant more rabbit holes to sort through which only grandmasters might find interesting.

In a recent novice nook article, it spoke about using fritz all night to analyse games properly. But in another novice nook article, i reckon it said using 10 seconds per move on chessmaster would cover most things a < 1500 player needs. I cannot account for the different time usages. I always thought Fritz was aimed at the much more sophisticated/advanced/studying type, hence deeper analysis was required.
 
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