Attacker, coward, swindler or endgame wizard: I'll show you how to win against anyone! After my World Championship victories in 2022 and 2023, I am the reigning Chess Software World Champion and am now looking forward to showing you how to become even stronger against your opponent. With my innovative training method, I simulate typical player personalities you know from tournaments and online chess: brash attackers, cautious cowards, passive players. But how do you win against them? Fritz will show you how!
Thanks to modern hardware, Fritz 19 can load a database with all its positions into memory and use it as an opening book. This works smoothly even with hundreds of games. The idea for this came from players wanting to try out the opening articles from ChessBase Magazine in a playful way. These articles consist of one or more heavily annotated games. Your ChessBase program repertoire databases are set up the same way. Many players keep separate databases for preparing with White and Black. With Fritz, you simply load these as database books and playfully practice your repertoire. This works great with the opponent personalities feature: Want to test a double-edged system against 1.e4 with Black? Pick the aggressive 'Bull' as your opponent.
Traditional opening books are short-sighted, showing only moves from the current position. The new database books come with notation and a small control board, which is super helpful with opening articles, allowing you to see comments on the variations.
There are two ways to open a database as a book:
Attacker, coward, swindler or endgame wizard: I'll show you how to win against anyone! After my World Championship victories in 2022 and 2023, I am the reigning Chess Software World Champion and am now looking forward to showing you how to become even stronger against your opponent. With my innovative training method, I simulate typical player personalities you know from tournaments and online chess: brash attackers, cautious cowards, passive players. But how do you win against them? Fritz will show you how!
a) Close the existing book with a right-click:
b) Then click on the 'Database Book' button:
The format of the database doesn't matter; it can also be a simple PGN file. Ideally, the database shouldn't have more than a few thousand games. Otherwise, loading takes a while, but you can always interrupt it. After loading the games as book positions, they merge into the notation, which happens in the background and may take some time. For short opening articles, this is just milliseconds.
After loading an opening article, you might not want to start from the initial position. Just right-click in the notation of the database book and select 'Play From Here'.
Simple clicks in the book notation don't affect the main game. The clicked position is shown on the control board on the right, but only when you select 'Play From Here', the variation up to the clicked position is copied into the game.
Note: This feature wasn't included in the first release of Fritz 19, so please install the latest update (Menu File -> Activation -> Program Update).
Try out the three buttons to the right of the book notation as well. Especially the small microscope makes sense in the book context, as it focuses the notation on the current variation. The trident button above it unfolds all the variations again.
If you can get a sufficient number of games from your next opponent, just prepare by playing against them: Suppose you're playing Black. Create a database of all your opponent's White games, load it as a database book, and play against it. It's best to set the 'Allrounder' as your opponent for a balanced and strong playing style.
Attacker, coward, swindler or endgame wizard: I'll show you how to win against anyone! After my World Championship victories in 2022 and 2023, I am the reigning Chess Software World Champion and am now looking forward to showing you how to become even stronger against your opponent. With my innovative training method, I simulate typical player personalities you know from tournaments and online chess: brash attackers, cautious cowards, passive players. But how do you win against them? Fritz will show you how!
Is this an effective way to train openings? Of course! When you repeatedly play a system instead of just cramming it, you get to know the position types and can find the right moves on the board, even without knowing all the variations.
We know from personal contacts that many top grandmasters play their preparations against engines. Now, not everyone has the 2700 Elo points to generate meaningful games, which is why the database book is especially handy with the 'normal' playing opponents in Fritz 19.
By the way, the opening books for Fritz's six opponent types are stored as database books in the directory ChessBase/Books/Personalities. These opening books are based on surveys created with ChessBase 17. In every ChessBase board window, there's a 'Surveys' tab in the notation. Saving such a survey in a database and then loading this as a database book lets Fritz play that repertoire.
Teach Fritz to play the Open Spanish: Create an overview of the fashionable black variations with ChessBase 17 and save it in the database book. In the header, it says 'Black', so Fritz will play this only as black.
Anyone who has ever dealt with opening books may wonder how the probability of playing each move is calculated. This probability depends on the number of moves in the subsequent variation tree: the more branches a move has, the more likely it is that Fritz will play it.
