Installing
ChessBase 12
If you are an ambitious chess player, if you want to continually improve your
chess and train systematically, if you want to prepare for your next opponent
– whether for a club match, an Open or for a top tournament, if you are
a coach or teach chess and want to find training material, if you like to play
through the best and most recent games with the latest opening trends, or if
you want to enter and analyse your own games… In short: if you have any
interest in chess whatsoever, then you just cannot do without the ChessBase
program.
ChessBase is the Swiss Army knife for the chess player – there is a tool
for every problem and an answer to every question! Now, the new ChessBase 12
is being released – and it has fascinating new possibilities...
Today we start a course on ChessBase 12, with instructions on how to install
the program and a quick look at a couple of interesting new functions. We will
continue the course over the next days and weeks, showing you how our flagship
program can change the way you study chess and prepare for tournaments.
We will assume that you have purchased the program as a DVD package –
there is also the possibility to get it as a download, whereby the installation
process remains basically the same.
When you insert the DVD it should start up automatically and offer to run the
Setup program.
The installer starts with a splash screen. Once you have finished admiring
our new and unusual graphic design click on "Install" to start the
process. The language of the installer will match that of your operating system
or region of residence. It will offer to install the program in an appropriate
directory, e.g. C:\Program Files\ChessBase\CBase12\. If you are not a computer
expert and do not have important reasons to point to a different directory just
accept the location it suggests. This will make all subsequent procedures, e.g.
updates, databases, etc. easier to handle.
ChessBase
12 requires around 190 MB of space on your hard drive. Follow the instructions
that appear. At one stage you will be asked (by Windows) for permission to install
the new software. The installation process should take around five minutes,
with a progress bar showing you that something is happening. In the end the
installer will ask to restart the computer. If you don't do this and opt to
do so later you may not have the correct fonts until you do so.
Once the installation is complete you will find a new desktop icon, which you
can double-click to start the program for the first time.
When you start the program for the first time it will offer to copy the databases
that are provided on the ChessBase 12 DVD to your hard drive. As a new user
you may want to install these databases. But if you are already a power user
and have lots of games (e.g. Mega Database) then you can tell the program to
proceed without installing the game files.
The next step is to enter the serial number: this is to be found inside the
DVD box and five groups of five digits. Type them in. You really cannot do anything
wrong: if you mistype the program will not allow you to click OK, and you can
correct the entry. Finally you need to recognize four characters displayed in
the verification box – to prove that you are a human and not a robot trying
to guess the serial number.
There is one more step: we need to activate the program. It will ask you to
do so with the above window. Just click "Program activation" and give
Window permission to activate ChessBase 12. All of the above is of course a
one-time procedure – it takes about ten minutes, and in the future a double-click
on the start icon will start the program without any further hassle. Except
one:
When you start ChessBase 12 in the future it will periodically remind you to
update the program. You also should do it immediately after installing the program
from DVD, which may have been manufactured immediately when the program was
first released. You can update the newly installed program using the following
menu:
The entire update procedure will just take a couple of minutes. Note that you
can also use the "Activate" option in the "File" menu above
if the program requires this. It is only after doing this that you have access
to the online database. Usually you will not have the enter the serial number
again: the manual activation will offer you the serial number you entered when
installing the program. And just for your information: "Deactivate"
allows you to switch to a new computer without ChessBase believing that it is
being pirated. Never give your serial number to other people. If someone is
trying to use it from a different location that will make our authentication
server very unhappy.
Incidentally,
if something goes wrong with the language detection during installation and
you see everything in a foreign language then you can fix it as follows: click
on the little red wrench on the top left of the ChessBase 12 window ("Options")
and then set the language to English. It won't happen, so don't worry about
it. However, you may want to take a look at some of the other options that are
useful, for example:
Do you want long or short algebraic notation? You can even select descriptive
notation, where 1.d4 is displayed as 1.P-Q4. The piece names can be modified
or figurine notation chosen, and you can even change the colours in which the
variations are displayed.
When
you start the program you will notice, to your great pleasure, that ChessBase
12 remembers everything from its previous installation: you see the same database
icons on the start screen, and the layout is pretty much the same as it was
for ChessBase 11. You should feel immediately at home with the new program.
On the bottom left you will find direct access to Playchess and to our special
game update service
which supplies the latest tournament games on a weekly basis. (In a separate
article coming soon we will go through the upgrade of Mega Database 2012 to
2013, which is of course another important step in upgrading your chess software.
When you double-click a database icon you will get the games list, and immediately
notice a very useful live board on the right. Clicking a game will display it,
with notation, on the replay board, and you can navigate using cursor keys or
by clicking on the notation with your mouse. All the other sorting functions,
tables, searches, tournament tables, etc. are similar in operation to those
in ChessBase 11 – though you will discover that most functions are much
more powerful than in the previous version.
New online search function
Let us take a simple example of a new function, just to get you in the mood.
In the database window of ChessBase 12 you will find a new search button:
The "Hard Disk" search gives you the regular search you know from
ChessBase 11, for games in the highlighted database. But the killer is the new
"Online" search, directly from ChessBase 12. Try clicking this button:
This produces a Google-like search mask where you can simply type in text,
as we have done in the above screen grab. In our example it produces the following
result:
The retrieval of the games is almost instantaneous – faster than from
your hard disk. This is because our online database is comprehensively indexed
and the games are found in almost no time (just as in a Google search). Naturally
the games can be loaded, replayed, saved, etc. – just like the games you
get from a search in your local Mega Database.
There is also an "Advanced" button, which allows you to filter the
search. Say you are playing Irina Krush tomorrow and have the black pieces.
You can conduct an online search for Irina's games, using the following advanced
settings:
Note that we have unclicked "Black" in order to retrieve only white
games, set an Elo for her opponents for 2500 or more, and narrowed the period
from 2011 to 2013 (her name is in the initial search mask). This is what you
get – instantaneously:
The games can be sorted (by clicking the column headers) according opponents,
results or, most relevantly, notation, to understand her repertoire and what
she is lightly to play on the morrow.
For instance we can click on "Notation" to sort the games and then
highlight all the ones that start with 1.c4. Hitting Enter in the above screen
will merge all six games into a single tree.
With the six games loaded we can click on the "Table" tab to get
a great overview of Irina's recent 1.c4 repertoire. We can also switch on an
engine and in fact use Let's Check to find very deep evaluations from other
computers on the Internet. Note that all of these actions – searching
for white Irina Krush games against strong opponents from the last two years
in the online database, merging all the 1.c4 games, generating a table overview
and switching on an engine with Let's Check to analyse the games took us less
than 30 seconds. Seriously.
This is where we end today's introduction to ChessBase 11. You have now learnt
how to install the program and seen a small fraction of the new features that
await you. This course will continue over the next days and weeks until you
have become, hopefully, a power user of our new flagship program.
ChessBase 12
Program
packages
- ChessBase 12
- Integrated CB online database with more than 5 million games
- Access to player encyclopaedia with over 30,000 pictures
- Language: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, German
- plus: ChessBase Big Database 2013. Automatic update until 31st December
2013
- plus: ChessBase Magazine subscription, half year, 3 issues DVD + print
- On DVD-ROM or download
179.90 EUR incl. 19% VAT
- ChessBase 12
- Integrated CB online database with more than 5 million games
- Access to player encyclopaedia with over 30,000 pictures
- Language: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, German
- plus: ChessBase Mega Database 2013 + automatic update until 31st December
2013
- plus: ChessBase Magazine subscription for one year (6 issues)
- On DVD-ROM or download
Euro 269.90 EUR incl. 19% VAT
- Integrated CB online database with more than 5 million games
- Access to player encyclopaedia with over 30 000 pictures
- Language: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, German
- Only as download
Euro 99.00 incl. 19% VAT
System requirements
Minimum: Pentium III 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM – Windows Vista, XP (Service Pack
3) – DirectX9 graphics card with 256 MB RAM – DVD-ROM drive –
Windows Media Player 9 and Internet access to activate the program, Playchess.com,
Let's Check, Engine Cloud and updates.
Order
ChessBase 12 in our ChessBase Shop