ChessBase 18 – Tips for Beginners, Part 4: Figurines and Colours

by Stefan Liebig
3/2/2025 – When you work with a programme on a regular basis, you should make that work as pleasant as possible. ChessBase 18 offers endless possibilities - and that goes for the look too. Make your workspace individual and pleasant. In part 4 of our new series of tutorials we will show you how easy it is to design your individual notation so that analysing with it is a maximum pleasure.

ChessBase 18 - Mega package ChessBase 18 - Mega package

Winning starts with what you know
The new version 18 offers completely new possibilities for chess training and analysis: playing style analysis, search for strategic themes, access to 6 billion Lichess games, player preparation by matching Lichess games, download Chess.com games with built-in API, built-in cloud engine and much more.

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In the first episodes we looked at entering moves and consulting references and the engine.

To not only know how to enter moves, but also how you like the visual representation, let's go back to that position and the corresponding notation from the previous tutorial

Our Rossolimo position

The notation

Format individaul notation

To make the settings explained in this section, you must first click on "File" in the main menu and then on "Options" at the bottom:

If you hover your mouse over the "Options" field, an information window will open that also shows you the shortcut. So you can go through the menu and click "File" and "Options" or select the shortcut CTRL+ALT+o. 

The following window will open. Click on ‘Notation’:

This part of the tutorial is about the ‘Notation’ and ‘View’ selections.
(We will cover the right-hand column with ‘Variations’, ‘Annotations’ and ‘Evaluation’ in a later episode.)

Notation menu - line by line

In the top row, you can switch between the different types of notation:

You can choose between the above short description, the detailed notation (e.g. 2.Ng1-f3, see the next two screenshots), the descriptive notation and the correspondence chess notation.

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Important: Always click ‘Apply’ or ‘OK’ after making changes!

‘Apply‘ applies the changes and leaves the options dialogue open.
‘OK’ applies the changes and closes the options dialogue.

You could also insert the character abbreviations of another language in the line below – e.g. the German abbreviations – it would then look like this:

If you first change the language (German + Apply – we will explain this in detail in a later episode), the abbreviations are automatically entered after clicking on KDSLTB.

This is how it looks with the German abbreviations. You can use the ‘KDNBRP’ key to switch back to the abbreviations commonly used in English.

One line down, you can click on ‘Figurines’. The letters in line 2 of this menu and in the notation are now replaced by the usual symbols for the pieces:

View

You can change the font under the item ‘Font’:

Here, the menu is already open after clicking on ‘Font’ – simply select the desired font and font size in the number field, check the preview window and then confirm with ‘OK’.

Under the items ‘Variation Colour’, ‘Text Colour’ and ‘Text Colour/Variations’ you can change the colour of the variations and texts you have created (more on this in a later tutorial episode).

This is what the result can look like:

Or a somewhat more complicated analysis (example game Botvinnik-Chekhover - analysed by Robert Hübner):

Pro tip:

- You can also use CTRL+mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the displayed font size when the mouse pointer is in the notation field.

- You can also display the notation as a score sheet. You can see in the screenshot that ‘Score sheet’ has been selected in the tabs:

... and now again: Have fun analysing your games, with the reference games and the engine variations!

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ChessBase has developed over decades to become what it is now in its 18th version. The program has countless options, which we will present here in small portions – so you can design your interface for pleasant daily use and keep learning about new options and how to use them to get the most out of ChessBase 18 and save time. 

We hope that this tip will help you to have more fun and be more successful when using ChessBase 18. You can find more tips and hints on our support pages and FAQ pages.

Links


Stefan Liebig, born in 1974, is a journalist and co-owner of a marketing agency. He now lives in Barterode near Göttingen. At the age of five, strange pieces on his neighbour’s shelf aroused his curiosity. Since then, the game of chess has cast a spell over him. Flying high in the NRW youth league with his home club SV Bad Laasphe and several appearances in the second division team of Tempo Göttingen were highlights for the former youth South Westphalia champion.
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