Analysing with Fritz 15

Answer

Fritz 15 offers the ability to analyze your game automatically, and tell you not only where you went wrong, but how you could improve your play.

The first step is to have a game ready to be analyzed. If you played it live, then you will need to enter the game manually, move-by-move.  Now set the engine to Infinite Analysis.

The feature is helpful, but it will be slower in the long run, and here's why: even if you see the move evaluations, it will not actually record these moves into the notation, so you would need to do this manually. Also, it is easy to get distracted or lost in the analysis and end up spending far more time watching the engine analyze than actually reviewing the game. After you are done entering the game, go to File and Save or Save As... before trying anything.

If you played the game online you have two options (aside from entering the game by hand as above):

The game was played in Playchess? Open the file where Playchess saves your games by going to the Home toolbar, then click on the Database button (F12) to go to the Database window.

On the right you should see an icon that says "MyInternetGames". Just click on it and the list of all the games you played on the server will be stored there. Choose the game you want, and double-click on it.

Please note that if you watched a game, whether played as a blitz, or from a broadcast, you can click on the icon "MyInternetKibitzing", and it will show all the games you watched!

Fritz to be able to analyze a game from another sites, the game needs to be saved in a PGN file. This should not be a problem though, since almost all sites support this, and this is how games played on Playchess on Android would be saved as well.

Go to the Home toolbar, then click on the Database button (F12) to go to the Database window. Now click on File and then Open (the direct shortcut for this is Ctrl-O).

A pane will open, allowing you to locate the PGN file. Before you go to the directory where the file is saved, click on Files of type, and select PGN files (*.PGN).

If you neglect this step, your PGN file will not appear even if you are in the correct directory. Now go to the correct directory, and open the PGN file.

There are two ways to automatically analyze a game using your engine, though they can be configured as you prefer. First you have the Blunder Check, which is a cut-down, no-nonsense analysis designed to highlight mistakes, then you have the Full Analysis, which is the most complete analysis with natural language comments.

Blunder Check

If you are reviewing blitz or bullet games played online, this will be your most commonly used analysis tool. It will give you a quick and clear overview of how you did in your game in record time.

Menu Analysis – Blundercheck

To use this, go to Analysis and select Blunder Check. Blunder Check is ideal for quick analysis to highlight which moves were mistakes, and by omission, which moves were not.  You can set it to analyze only your side, both sides, and more.

On the  right side you can see Time or Depth, which is to choose whether you want each move analyzed for a specific number of seconds, or instead prefer a determined depth.

How much time or how deep is good enough? As a rule, I use a fixed depth of 14 plies and just let it zip through. 14 plies is far deeper than a human will see as a rule, and on a modern computer will be reached in a fraction of a second. This means that the entire game will be analyzed quite literally in seconds.  You can have the machine spend more time, but it would be silly to have it analyzing longer than you spent playing it.

The next significant choice is the Threshold, which determines what the engine will call a 'blunder'

The default setting is 60, which means 0.60 pawns. Although a difference of 0.60 may indeed be a mistake, you might really be interested only in flagging moves that lose a little or a lot of material. If so, set it to a higher value such as 90 for a pawn (remember it might calculate some minuscule compensation for the lost material, lowering the value).

It should be mentioned that you can use the program to check your analysis as well. Suppose you wanted to analyze the game yourself without any computer help (an excellent exercise), and entered the variations into the annotation. You can ask the engine to not only analyze your moves, but your analysis as well.

To request analysis of the variations as well, put a check in Check variations.  Although these are the essential choices, feel free to consult the Help button in the pane for a more detailed description of all the options.

Full Analysis

With this function you will get opening commentary accessing your database, more natural commentary including moves that were correctly avoided. In other words, why a certain move that was not played, would have been a mistake. Finally, you get text commentary to emulate a human annotator to a degree, that will point out threatened material, passed pawns, and more.

To activate it, click on Analysis and then Full Analysis.

When you do this you are presented with a minimalist pane that just shows you a time to spend analyzing. This presumes you wish to use the previous, or default choices. To modify them, click on Advanced.

Here, a new pane opens. Most options are self-explanatory, but not all. If you put a check mark in the Opening Reference, you need to tell the program which database to consult.  To do so, click on Reference-DB.

A pane opens in which you point it to a database it will consult this time and all future times unless you change it.  The threshold is the same as in the Blunder Check above, and is the minimum difference between its choice and yours, to highlight a move as an error. 

 

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Created on
15.06.2016
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