Winning starts with what you know
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Bring up Fritz8's Search mask (as described in previous articles in this series) and click the "Medals" tab. You should see the following dialogue:
Medals are a special annotation form that ChessBase 8 owners [1] can use to mark games of special interest. Medals appear in a database's game list as a set of multicolored bars. You can search for games that contain a particular medal by selecting it in this dialogue.
[1] You might be able to infer from this comment that ChessBase 8 is indeed required to be able to add or delete medals from a database game; it can't be done in Fritz8.
Just click on the box next to a particular type of medal ("Best game" for example) to select it. You'll see the box at the top of the dialogue change color to reflect the color of the medal you've just selected:
Click "OK" and the program will provide a list of all games in the database in which this particular medal was used.
Note that you can select more than one type of medal. The box at the top of the dialogue will change to show all of the medal types you've selected:
However you also need to be aware that if you select, say, two medal types only games in which both types of medals are used (in the same game) will be displayed. For example, I searched a large database for games containing the "Best game" medal and the search provided 182 games. But when I added the "Tactical blunder" medal to the search criteria (to search for both "Best game" and "Tactical blunder", only eleven games were found -- all of which used both medal types.
Note also that there is one exception to Footnote 1 above. A user can't manually assign medals to games using Fritz8, but the program will occasionally add the "Tactical Blunder" medal to a game as part of the overnight analysis features.
People frequently ask what the various medal colors mean. I could provide a list (and have done so in previous articles) but some users want to quibble about the names used to describe the colors [2]. You best bet is simply to click on a box in the Medals dialogue of the Search mask -- the box at the top of the dialogue will change and display the color that corresponds to that medal type.
[2] Various graphics cards can (and do) display colors differently from each other; what appears as "Cyan" while using one card may appear somewhat differently when another card is employed. Throw in the fact that some users' definition of "Cyan" may differ from the definition used by the programmers, and that other users might not even know what "Cyan" is, and you can see where the confusion easily occurs.
That's all for medals. See? I told you that this would be a short piece! Next week we'll put together some searches which use multiple dialogues of the Search mask. Until then, have fun!
