ChessBase Support

Creating your own opening books

Answer

Fritz and the other chess programs, such as, e.g., Komodo or Houdini, are remarkably well suited to training in chess openings. In the opening phase the program plays its moves immediately without calculating. The reason: the program has access to an openings file in which a plethora of tried and tested opening moves have been stored. The openings file of a chess program is described as an Openings book. In the latest versions you can employ either the openings book which is stored locally on your hard disk or the constantly updated LiveBook.

The following description refers to opening books which you produce yourself and which you can store locally on your hard disk. The openings file/tree of positions belonging to Fritz is a database which contains exclusively positions. For that reason the format of the openings book is also described as tree of positions. For openings training a tree of positions offers the following advantages:

For any specific position on the board you receive an overview of all the moves which have been played, including meaningful statistics.

This way of doing things reliably recognises transpositions of moves.

When you purchase Fritz an openings book is included. In practice, however, it will frequently be the case that you will want to create for your training your own, thematically organised openings books. This is something you can manage simply with the chess programs.

Basic principles

Let us assume that you would like your chess program to play precisely those openings which Magnus Carlsen employs in his own practice. Opening systems which are used by the world champion must after all have advantages which you will be able to experiment with against your electronic “grandmaster”. Other areas which can be used for training might be openings books which are based exclusively on predetermined opening systems.

Let us now take a look at the preparations which are necessary in order to generate our new book with Carlsen’s repertoire.

1. A new openings book

2. A database with the games of Magnus Carlsen, which will serve as the basis for our openings book.

Tip: The procedure for setting up a new book is always the same. You require an openings book and games (a database) which you can import into your openings book.

Installing a new book

The quickest method for creating a new positions tree is the key combination CTRL-Shift-Alt-F11 or via the file menu.

In the dialog box you can enter a name for your new book, e.g. “Carlsen.Ctg.”

Tip: You should remember that you can always recognise Fritz-books from the file extension CTG.

Setting up the database

Now we still need a database with the Carlsen games we wish to import into our new book. How do we get these games? An ideal starting point for this is one of the games collections which we offer, either Big DataBase/MegaBase or the games database supplied with the programs.

We now create a new database which we shall go on to stock with Carlsen games. To do so, the following steps are required:

Create a new database. To do that, press the F12 key to get to the database window. Then click on the “New” icon in the file menu or go via the key combination CTRL – X. In our example we shall give the name Carlsen.cbh to our new database.

Now we have to copy Carlsen’s games from the MegaBase or some other source database into our new database. Open the source database which contains the games by Carlsen and choose the key combination CTRL – F. Now enter into the search mask the name Carlsen.

At this point, moreover, you could also choose a strict separation between his repertoire as White and as Black. To do that the box “Ignore colours” must be unchecked.

The search routine now works its way through the selected source database and lists all the games by Carlsen. These games which will serve us as the basic data for our new book must now be saved into the newly created database.

In the list with the results of your search highlight the first entry and then press the key combination SHIFT – END. As you see, all the entries on the list h=are highlighted in dark colour. Now press the key combination Ctrl-C and the data will be copied into the clipboard.

Now change to the destination database “Carlsen.cbh”. In the database window that can be found particularly quickly via File – “Recent databases”.

To transfer the games from the clipboard, now press Ctrl-V.

Confirm this with OK and we now have a games database with in any case 2144 games which will serve us as the basis of our new openings book.

Transferring the games into the book

We now reach the final step: we transfer the games played by GM Carlsen into the openings book we set up earlier. In the board window, under Analysis – Openings book we find the entry “Import games”.

Of course we give as a source our database Carlsen.cbh in the database selection box and confirm with open. Now the program confronts us with the dialog box Import games, which looks like this:

The program is “thinking” about this and wants us to tell it whether each game should be copied over simply up to a fixed number of moves or on the basis of ECO (=Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings). We decide on the second option and confirm it with OK.

We’ve done it! As you can now see in the book window beside the chess board, the book has been furnished with contents and from now on the chess program will now play according to the opening repertoire of Magnus Carlsen.

Tags