Search for Novelties


Answer

Active tournament players spend a lot of effort on maintaining their opening repertoire. An effective weapon is to confront the opponent with an innovation, i.e. a move in an opening variation that has never been played before. ChessBase 16 offers numerous functions, e.g. the function "Novelty mining" or the simple procedure described below.

Load one of your saved games into the board window. Activate access to the online database by clicking on the corresponding button.

Now simply replay the game notation until no more continuations are displayed in the "Online database" window. This is indicated by the program with the note " No games to display". So now mark the last move within the notation as a new move.

Replace the change within the notation with the key combination CTRL-S.

The next step is to investigate the quality of the new move. The online database or the search function of ChessBase can help you to find out what was chosen by other tournament players in the position before the new move. Possible alternatives can be quickly marked for subsequent analysis with the short symbols, e.g. !? etc.

In practice - I can hardly imagine any other approach - you should check the innovation with a chess engine. Usually several engines are already available, these can do an excellent job of checking the move continuations concretely.

In practice - I can hardly imagine any other approach - you should check the innovation with a chess engine. As a rule, several engines are already available, and these can do an excellent job of checking the move continuations in concrete terms.

This procedure is time-consuming but in my opinion very useful, because explicitly the specifications and peculiarities of the own repertoire are considered!

Another efficient function for editing and tracking down innovations can be found in the Live book, i.e. the huge position tree stored online, which can alternatively be displayed in the notation window.

Load an opening position into the board window that is relevant to your repertoire or preparation for an opponent. Click on the "LiveBook" tab in the notation window. Here you will find the new entry "Novelty mining ".

After the click, the settings dialog is started first. Here you can specify exactly how the search for a playable (usable) novelty should be performed by the engine defined as the default engine. The engine search of the prospecting runs very efficiently. Normally, one would set up a search with many multivariants to search broadly for alternatives. However, the multivariant search gives at least as much computation time to the main variant as to all other continuations. Thus, minor variants would be computed much more shallowly.

When prospecting, the frequently played variants are excluded depending on the setting under "Already played" via the UCI interface. This way the full computing power goes right into the alternate candidates. I am sure that this important function is used by almost all top players to expand their opening repertoire!

Of course, you can also use the program to automate the search for innovations with other steps. For this purpose there is a function " Novelty annotation" in the Report menu.

The program scans the database for innovations and inserts the corresponding occurrences with an N in the notation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Created on
05.05.2022
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