We proudly announce: ChessBase 14 is now available

ChessBase 14 – a guide to main new functions

Assisted Analysis

Click a piece and its target squares will light up in a color related to the strength of the move to that square. Green moves are strong, yellow moves are mediocre, red moves are mistakes, blue moves are book moves, and black moves are mating.

Assisted Analysis is a new approach to interactive chess analysis:

• You get information about all possible moves of a piece at one glance.
• No need to avert your eyes from the board and no need to process numbers and moves – you just look at the pieces.
• No hassle with creating and deleting trial-and-error variations in the game notation.
• Your chess cognition is constantly challenged, because you ask yourself questions like “Why is this natural square for my knight marked red?” Sometimes the answer can be deep and lead to insights which you would not stumbled across with conventional engine output. Compare this to the mental passivity of simply entering engine lines.

Tactical Analysis

Tactical Analysis is the most comprehensive full game analysis available today. It annotates games by looking at:

• opening theory;
• strong moves, combinations, sacrifices and double attacks;
• mistakes, blunders and critical turning points;
• weak moves that were not played in the game (Why can’t I take this?), often leading to tactical refutations;
• threats and attack motives;
• defensive ideas;
• initiative;
• attack;
• manoeuvres and piece placement;
• compensation;
• endgame classification;
• illogical game results.

Games are annotated with variations, natural language text, chess annotation symbols and diagrams.

• For a loaded game use the Tab "Analysis" and click Tactical Analysis.
• To annotate games in a database, select them in the games list with Ctrl (or Shift) Click, then right-click and select "Tactical Analysis".
• To annotate a whole database, select all games with Ctrl-A, then right-click and select "Tactical Analysis".

A note about thinking times. On a very fast modern computer you can get away with 0 or 1 seconds per move (0 seconds will be 500ms per move, which is an eternity for a modern chess engine). To be on the safe side, we recommend five seconds per move. For a single game you can of course go much higher, but in general fast searches will already yield interesting results.

Game Input Mode

CBase 14 can be switched to a special “Game Input Mode”. There are differences in behavior:

• Assisted Analysis is switched off
• The variation dialog always appears
• A new modeless dialog for thinking time input is available
• The program keeps more tournament information after “New Game”

Color coded variations in notation

In more densely annotated games, like opening analysis, the structure of variations can quickly become difficult to read. ChessBase 14 gives you instant orientation in in deep variations by marking the current variation and its siblings in equivalent colors. Also you immediately recognize all alternative moves in the same hierarchy level, because they have the same color.

Diagrams in notation – improved display of training questions

A diagram is a powerful annotation device. It strongly emphasizes an interesting position in a game. Diagrams can now be embedded in the game notation. Click the diagram symbol in the annotation toolbar to toggle a diagram.

With diagrams, the training questions are now handled much smoother: a training question consists of a diagram and clickable links for solution, as well as help embedded in the notation.

New convention for saving/replacing games

All previous ChessBase versions distinguished between saving games and replacing games. Saving in earlier versions meant to append a new version of the game at the end of a database list. Replacing changed the game itself without duplicating it. This is not equivalent to what people are used from other programs.

So from ChessBase 14 onwards, there is a radical change: “Saving” a game means replacing its existing version. However with “Save Game As”, you can append it to any database, with a shortcut to recently used databases. In connection with this, the database format has been optimized for very fast saving (=Replacing) games in huge databases like the Mega.

Cloud Clip – Recent Games

There is a new cloud database, called “Cloud Clip”. It automatically stores games from ChessBase.com, fritz.chessbase.com and tactics.chessbase.com if you are logged in with your ChessBase Account. This is especially useful for our news page: the instant you click on a game while reading an article on Chessbase.com, it is available in ChessBase 14. Just Alt-Tab the programs to work with it. No more downloads necessary.

What else?

The perfect combination

If you install ChessBase 14 together with Powerbook 2017 and Mega Database 2017 on your notebook you will have the same basic equipment to keep up with chess theory as the World Champion.

Order ChessBase 14 + Fritz Powerbook 2017 + Mega Database 2017 now!