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Chessville
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Chess Position Trainer 3.0 by the author Stefan Renzewitz Chess Position Trainer (CPT) is a repertoire-management software which has been developed by a chess player for his own purposes: A tool to organize all of his chess material in a more efficient way (as current software like Bookup, Chess Assistant or Chessbase allowed him to do) and at the same time offer features to study it much more efficiently than ever before. With chess material we are talking about chess books, CD’s and databases. They all play an important role in improving someone’s chess skill and CPT doesn’t aim to replace them. Just the opposite is true. CPT will help you to get even more out of them, and in a more efficient way. CPT is a totally new chess software which has been in development since March 2004. Six months later and many late evenings / weekends (as the author has in his real life already a job, girlfriend and other stuff to do) version 3 has been just released. The first two versions haven’t been made public by intention untill all intended features have been finally implemented. With version 3 this is the case now and 48 hours after the announcement in a few chess newsgroups some hundred chess players had already downloaded this freeware program. But what exactly is it all about?
Chess Position Trainer 3.0 Let’s list some of the key features of CPT first:
Chess Position Trainer is aimed at ambitious and serious chess players who already study or want to study chess books, CD’s and use chess databases as well as chess engines to improve their chess skill. It will soon become probably your perfect addition to these other chess tools. On its own CPT won’t teach you how to
play better chess though this might change in the future once there are some
training eBooks available. However, you will
soon appreciate this chess tool if you ever were looking for a more
efficient way to manage and study your chess material: Chess Position
Trainer is the perfect choice and all you need to achieve this. The
best of all: It’s for free! Common Practice To Study Chess Material Typically you have a +300 page book about your favourite opening which covers all lines including all sidelines. Now you study the ideas behind all variations and make decisions which one you want to play, but how do you study only these variations afterwards? There is not really an efficient way to do so. If you want to play certain variations it becomes clear that for each position within these variations there is only one move for your colour to make if you want to stay in the variation. This move is called the candidate move in CPT. To know these candidate moves becomes more important the higher the level of your opponents is. Against players below an ELO rating of 2000 you won’t need much opening theory (your opponent is not playing theory after the third move quite often anyway). Tactic and endgame knowledge is more useful, but even then this tool will be of great help for you, because it supports studying end and middle game positions too. The true gem of CPT is how it attempts to get really the most out of the information which you entered manually or by importing your played games, chess CD’s or other electronically resources. The unique training mode will be a feature you don’t want to miss anymore. It automatically focuses on your weaknesses. In combination with the very handy support to run your played games against your repertoire database you will quickly realize how much more efficient your chess study will become. Actually you will probably no longer waste useful information (e.g. from played games) because you were too lazy to research where you or your opponent went wrong or played a novelty. Once configured this information is available within a few seconds. You get to the critical position by one click and by a simple copy & paste action you can analyze it with your favourite engine (in a future CPT version some engines will be already integrated). Think for a moment: how do you achieve the same right now, if you are making that effort at all? With all the information which CPT is
gathering it is possible to give you finally a single and trustworthy
percentage number reflecting the knowledge of your own repertoire. This little number will soon become a
major motivator for you and at the end learning the vocabulary of chess will
turn out to be a lot of more fun than you ever thought it could be and far
away from a dry job (heck, even developing this tool was fun!) The Candidate Move Concept If you want to understand how CPT works it’s critical to understand the concept of “Candidate Moves.” In CPT not concrete games, but just positions and moves are saved. Of course, with this information it’s possible to re-calculate a move order to reach a certain position, but in general the approach is very different to typical chess databases, because the goal of CPT is quite different too. With CPT you want to manage your repertoire rather than your games or the games of someone else nor do you want to study openings by looking at games of other players. For all these purposes you can use Chess Assistant and Chessbase which are just perfect for that job. A repertoire is the result of chess material you studied either by reading chess books or chess CD’s or both. It’s your personal essence out of this material. In general you will study some material and make decisions about which variation fits your style. At the end it comes down to a single move for each possible position of the variations you want to play. These single moves are called “candidate moves”. Let’s say you face with Black e4. You always want to play the Sicilian as the reply to 1.e4 so the candidate move in that position is 1...c5. All other moves, while they might be absolutely sound, are not your first candidate move. CPT won’t help you to find all these single moves, but it will help you to organize and to train them in a very efficient way. The candidate move concept is very important in CPT. Many other concepts are based on this basic concept. Of course, sometimes there exist two
candidate moves which you would like to play and especially the stronger you
are the more likely it is that you have more than one line which you can
play for the most popular variations just to make it harder for your
opponent to prepare the game, but even then it’s quite easy with CPT to
manage the repertoire. You can have more
than one candidate move and later change the order of your candidate moves.
However, only the first ranked will be considered for
several functions which CPT offers like the training mode. Sub-Repertoires How do you organize your repertoire at the moment? Do you have one database for each opening, e.g. Dragon, Caro-Kann, French etc.? Maybe you have one for Black and one for White? In CPT you have only one database which is divided into sub-repertoires. If you create a repertoire for your openings you might have sub-repertoires for Pirc, English etc. For each sub-repertoire you decide whether you are playing White or Black. Beside an opening repertoire you might want to create another one for key endgame positions or middle game positions. In case of an endgame repertoire you could create sub-repertoires for rook, bishop and pawn endings etc. Even a repertoire for chess puzzles only is possible.
You can arrange the windows as you like in CPT! At the end everything is gathered in just one repertoire and hence only one click away. For each sub-repertoire you can see a percentage rate how good you know it already. This brings us to the next topic: The training mode of CPT.
You can enter key middle- and endgame positions in
CPT Training Mode When the project started there was not one chess software program on the market which supported me in learning my chess material in a really efficient way. Hence the innovative training mode of CPT was originally the main motivator for this project. In CPT every position of your sub-repertoires has a training score. It’s the result of your last 10 training sessions. During a training session you will be asked for a position of your sub-repertoire colour what the correct move is (the candidate move). You have to find that move without any hint. If you make the correct move your training score for that specific position will increase by 10% otherwise it will decrease by 10%. When you made a wrong move CPT will show you the correct one highlighted before it continues with the next position where you have to move.
Training in action With the training score information it’s possible to focus on your weaknesses. CPT always picks your worst 10 positions and ask you what the candidate move is. Now some players probably don’t like the idea to jump from one position to another one without any connection between them except having the worst training scores. For this reason CPT offers many training options. Let’s give some possible combinations:
Note: Random only means that the next move is not necessarily in the same line you just have been asked about. CPT picks always the worst position, but you can decide among which it shall pick the worst. E.G., the worst labelled position or while training whole variations it would pick the next move for the opposite colour based on the information which one leads to the position with your worst training score and so on. This will ensure that you study your material really efficiently while you decide the style you want to train with. Increasing these training scores becomes highly addictive! Your repertoire score will increase slower than your position training scores, because it’s the average training score of all positions where you have to move. However, once that score is 100% you can be quite confident that you really know your repertoire. Let’s continue with the last feature described in this article to get know an alternative way to update your training scores. Running Your Played Games Against Your Repertoire That’s probably one of the most powerful features which CPT offers. The typical situation: you play several games over the internet or at a tournament. How can you find out what went wrong? Yes, you can use a chess engine, let it analyse it and finally let it show you what it would have played different. But if you entered already your whole repertoire, you might like to know where you or your opponent played a so called “novelty”. That is, a move not covered by your repertoire. Your chess engine will show you moves which it questions and you played absolutely by intention, because they are part of your repertoire. Of course, from time to time you have to check your lines again, but more straight forward is a different approach, which CPT follows. Once configured you can run your played games against your repertoire. Therefore you only have to set the pgn file and your player name. If you use this function a new window will be opened beside the main window.
CPT shows you the novelties of the games you played
automatically You can see at the bottom a list of games I played on ICC a while ago. My nickname is “Amarok” on that server. For the first game CPT shows you the first move which is a novelty according to the repertoire file. In this case it was my opponent who played a move I didn’t expect. I’m a Chigorin player and now I’m out of theory right after the second move. Thanks to CPT after some blitz sessions I can later easily get back to these critical positions. If you click on any other game in the list CPT will show the first novelty for that game. At the same time it will automatically focus in the main window the sub-repertoire to which the move should belong, but is not yet covered:
CPT automatically finds the sub-repertoire which
doesn’t cover the novelty You can see that I was only prepared for c4 and Nf3, but not for Bg5. You can navigate through this sub-repertoire, add the move and try to fill the gap by doing some research in your chess material (especially in such specific situations programs like Chess Assistant and Chessbase are invaluable). You can also get back to the game window and navigate there through the game, click on another game. Once you are done you can close that window and get back to the main window. It’s good to see where something went wrong, but it would be even better if you could use this information similar to the training mode to update your training scores. You probably guessed it already: CPT can do that too! When you choose the function to update your training scores based on the games you played, CPT will automatically find out for every game where you didn’t play your candidate move for a specific position and it does even more: it automatically figures out which sub-repertoire corresponds to the game and the position in question. Thus it makes the whole process a piece of cake. You can use this feature to train not only in the training mode, but also by playing games on chess servers. Again, CPT offers you several ways to study your chess material in an efficient way, but you decide which method you prefer. Conclusion Overall with CPT you will soon save a lot of time while studying your chess material and at the same time you will be more confident that you know your repertoire than ever before, because CPT structured and smart approach ensures that no weaknesses in your repertoire remain undiscovered. You can find more information and download Chess Position Trainer 3.0 full version for free.
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