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Chess Position Trainer 3.2 by the author Stefan Renzewitz Dear Chess Followers, recently Chess Position Trainer (CPT) 3.2 was released and since my last article about Chess Position Trainer 3.0 much happened – fastened your seat belts and read on what’s new and in store for you (a lot)!
Sub-Title: View as many sub-repertoires at the same time as you like CPT is a popular chess repertoire management software which you can get for free (no trial version). More than 70 training options are at your hand just for the opening training and most of them can even be freely combined. To say CPT is strong on opening training is an underestimation. “CPT is truly unmatched in variety of Opening Training-Options.”, Jhorwin - National Master For free? Right, you have nothing to pay and still get quite a lot – many features are unique and can’t be found in any commercial software! Do you still go to your next over-the-board game without having decided what to play after let’s say 1.e4 e5? Don’t re-invent the wheel each time you play a game, but instead prepare your opening and know ahead which move you want to play whatever your opponent plays for the first 10 and more moves. Some players even have to think whether they want to play today 1.d4 or 1.e4 depending on their mood. You waste valuable time in the opening which is better used for the middle and endgame if you have to think about the first >10 moves in the opening. Even worse unlike the later stage of the game learning an opening has absolute nothing to do with intelligence (except researching and choosing your preferred variations). You only need a good software program which let you create, manage and train your own repertoire – hang on!
Sub-Title: The improved look & feel of the new version A natural approach to represent and manage your repertoire Chess Position Trainer helps you to manage your own opening repertoire in an efficient and intuitive way. Where game databases use pseudo games to let you create your repertoire CPT is representing your repertoire in a more natural way by using positions and candidate moves without any concrete game reference (similar to an editable personal opening tree/book). Like I said it makes no sense to manage all possible first moves for White when you are playing this side. Instead make the decision in time which is your first move (e.g. 1.e4). Then consider all reasonable replies for your opponent (e.g. e5, d5, c5, g6…). For each Black reply decide what your preferred next move should be. To find these moves you can use opening books, chess CD’s or game databases. However, at the end you usually enter only one move for your side and many for the other side. These moves are also called candidate moves in CPT. At any position you can see a list of all candidate moves which you’ve already entered (or imported from PGN files!). This makes the navigation through your repertoire a piece of cake as you don’t follow abstract games and variations, but just branches similar to a printed opening book (but with the benefits of being electronically). Further more these candidate moves can easily be trained in the sophisticated training center. The new chess learning methodology CPT introduced as first chess software the flash-card concept in a comprehensive way to chess in 2004 which is also well known from learning a foreign language. This lead to a major change in how efficient a chess player can study his own repertoire. Till then chess software would train the user randomly in his repertoire (if at all). Therefore the training center of CPT is the true gem of the program. You have plenty of options to train not only your openings, but also repertoires with tactical positions. "This is one [of] the greatest software for chess training, I really love it!", Nelson The training works in general as follows: Based on your personal repertoire (remember the candidate moves you entered for your and the other side above?) the computer is playing the opponents move while you have to find the pre-defined candidate moves for your side. You can even let the computer demo the variation first before you have to play it yourself. Whenever you fail to find the right move for your side your training score for that position will decrease otherwise increase. This information is stored even if you close the program. As you are learning your repertoire CPT is also learning which variations and positions caused you the most trouble in the past and leads you to these variations magically (it’s a computer and doesn’t know any mercy!). Whichever of the more than 70 training options you choose CPT will always (!) train you in your worst variations and positions within the chosen selection (e.g. just the first 10 moves). Think for a while how you study your opening today and than imagine how much time you would save by using CPT! Now let’s have a look at the major new improvements:
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About 60(!) new training options leading to more than 70
Sub-Title: Editing tactical positions became a breeze In this article we have a closer look at the following features:
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Using EPD export / import in conjunction with backsolving / min-max
calculation Using EPD export / import in conjunction with backsolving / min-max calculation Some people will tell you that backsolving is the most sophisticated feature you can find in a chess software. Well, from a programmer’s point of view it’s just a recursive procedure with about 20 lines of code and not too impressing at all. However, there lays some truth in it. Properly used it can be a quite helpful and powerful function, but in my opinion only really important for people who spent a lot of time in making their opening repertoire perfect and keep it up-to-date.
Sub-Title: The new EPD-Import function is optimized for supporting backsolving Backsolving will set position assessments for all positions in your repertoire if the leave nodes or better all end positions are evaluated. In CPT your repertoire is represented as a tree where a child node (next move of a variation) can have more than one father due to transposition (more than one variation can lead to the same position). However, the deeper you follow a variation the deeper you go down in the tree. The last move in a variation represents a leave node of the tree. "...congratulations on making the first *good-looking* chess trainer around." Now assume that each leaf node / end position is already evaluated as equal, slightly better for black or clearly better for white etc. With this information available you can say what the correct assessment of the previous position one move before is (one level up in the tree), because you know already what the player to move can achieve at best by force (that is he is playing the move which leads to the best evaluated position for him no matter what his opponent plays). Now you can repeat this procedure backwards through the tree till you end up at the top node, the start position. Then all positions will be assigned an assessment and you can tell for each node what the best possible result is for white / black in a given position which can be reached by the player to move by force. Example: Let's say there exist two moves for a position: Ne4 and Qg6. Now you know that Ne4 leads to a position +- and Qg6 to =. This means that the current position is already +- as you can get into a variation which is evaluated as +- by force.
Sub-Title: Several import and export functions give you totally new opportunities With the new version of CPT you can export just all leaf nodes of your repertoire, analyze them with a specialized program and later import just the evaluation of all leaf nodes back into CPT. This way you can simply start with backsolving and retrieve a completely analysed repertoire with almost no effort. Now the downside: For really reliable position evaluations its key that all end positions / leaf nodes are correctly evaluated as they are the basis for all other evaluations up the tree and at least as important is that you don’t miss any important lines and thus end positions which would lead to totally different results (e.g. a missed winning variation can make all other variations obsolete). However, if you want to manage a top-notch repertoire the good news are that EPD import / export as well as backsolving are now available with CPT 3.2. Training wizard & new training features The very popular training centre has been even further improved and offers now more than 70 almost freely combinable options.
Sub-Title: In CPT 3.0 you had to live with these options
Sub-Title: CPT 3.2 has now more than 70 training options divided into several tabs The base concept behind the training method remained the same. CPT presents you during the training session positions of your own repertoire where you have to find the correct continuation for your side while CPT plays for the opponent. The flashcard-concept of CPT 3.2 always ensures that you work on your weaknesses and saves your training results for every position you are trained in (last ten results for each position)! Don’t worry anymore that you have somewhere a gap in your repertoire, because CPT is automatically taking care of that. You will find out that you can adjust the training to your likings in many ways. Let’s say you already know your repertoire pretty well then you can decide to jump to your worst positions right away. Instead of having to play the same variation over and over again just to get to that critical position where you missed the move last time you will start right away at that position and thus not wasting any time anymore on boring moves. Another example: Assume you don’t know already very well your repertoire then CPT will first show you the line which it wants you to train in and in the second run you have to play your side on your own. Also you might want to evenly learn new openings instead of some variations till move 30 while you don’t know other lines after move 4. You can easily set in the options till which move you want to be trained in the variations and thus step by step increase the number in correlation to your knowledge. If you make any mistakes you will get audio and visual feedback (e.g. correct piece highlighted with a circle). All this is leading to a much improved training experience and at the end there are good chances that you become addictive to learning your openings! You don’t believe that? Give it a try, you won’t be the first one! "I recently downloaded your Chess Position Trainer application, great work! Better training features than all the commercial software out there yet free of charge!", Stefano B. Of course the sheer amount of training options can become overwhelming for a new user even though there is detailed help integrated right into the option tabs and even a printable manual is online available. Though the training wizard has been introduced with CPT 3.2 to make life easier for all new CPT followers.
Sub-Title: Get in just a few clicks perfect settings out of 70 combinable training options You pick the sub-repertoire which you want to train (e.g. Sicilian Dragon, Scandinavian or Pirc). Pick a difficult level (range goes from novice till nightmare) and that’s it! Among all 70 options CPT will automatically choose in the background those settings which fits your current knowledge best. Of course you can fine-tune these settings anytime. Training your visualization skills with CPT A very powerful new feature has been added to the training centre. There exist some chess software on the market which let you train your visualization skills by working through pre-defined exercises. CPT 3.2 is taking this to the next level. You no longer have to train ‘any’ positions, but rather your personal repertoire blindfolded!
Sub-Title: Train your own repertoire blindfolded! By now you probably guessed already that for this training mode plenty of options are available too. For example you can decide that no pieces at all will be displayed or just no pawns of black or just no pieces in the centre or no pieces of white etc. If you now set a time-limit to find the right move for each position within 3 seconds you get close to the so called “nightmare” mode which even a GM will challenge. Improved novelty feature An extremely powerful feature of CPT 3.0 was the function to run your own games against your repertoire. Basically you could load-up a whole PGN file containing your last 100 or more over the board or internet blitz games and run them all together against your whole repertoire. Then CPT would show you for each game where you or your opponent left your repertoire. Which means in case that you left your repertoire that you made a “mistake”. If your opponent left your repertoire it means you didn’t consider his move yet. Time for an update which can be done with a simple click on accept and yet the move has been added to your repertoire marked as ‘ToDo’ which makes it easy to get back to later.
Sub-Title: The interface has been optimised and novelties can be easily added to your repertoire Now the new feature let you mark all those positions where you didn’t play your candidate move with one click and afterwards train them with all the options available in the training centre.
Sub-Title: There is a new option available to just train “positions of missed candidate moves” Beside training positions where you missed the correct candidate move you might also like the new feature of auto-adding comments to your positions like you can see in the screenshot below. Of course you can toggle between all positions of this type by a single key stroke making it extremely easy to check for each position in which game you missed the move and what you played instead.
Sub-Title: CPT will add auto-comments to positions where you missed the candidate move and mark them Defining more than one candidate move as correct for training Many players asked for such a feature and CPT offers this feature as the first repertoire management software on the market now. If you are an advanced player you probably have some backup variations for your repertoire to which you can switch at anytime just to make it more difficult for your opponents to prepare for a game against you. Now CPT takes this fully into account. You can set as many candidate moves as “best moves” as you like. Then you can set in the training options that not just the first candidate move, but all “best moves” should be accepted during the training session. For strong players this will be a real cure for their work-arounds which they had to make on their own so far to train their different lines. Visual improvements Since version 3.0 CPT got much praise for its customisable, attractive and intuitive user interface. With version 3.2 there have been made many further improvements. First of all professional icons are used for the toolbar and menu items. Then you can adjust the colors of the chessboard to your likings and the chess pieces have been substituted by better looking ones.
Sub-Title: Candidate moves and the last move can be highlighted now “Also, CPT's feature of using colored arrows to point candidates allows me to comfortably remain my eyes focused at the board all the time!“, Ryan 13. September However, you will certainly like most the new auto-arrow-colors for candidate moves which indicate by width and color for any position which candidate move exists and what’s their assessment is and thus making it even easier for you to navigate through your repertoire and getting a quick grasp about what’s going on at a given position.
Sub-Title: You can adjust the colors of arrows to your
liking.
Sub-Title: The colors of the chessboard are now customizable too Outlook: Chess Position Trainer 4 There is some work going on for CPT 4 for a while already. Some of the major new features are:
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New professional storage system which will be highly scalable and
virtually manage any database size. “CPT is a great program, the first one that is really useful for opening training.”, Raymond If you really want to improve your opening play, this is the most effective, most efficient way to do so short of having a GM sit by your side. Get CPT for free now and know your openings as good as the great Kasparov in almost no time! You can get it for free – now! http://community.chesspositiontrainer.com/files/default.aspx You can subscribe to the free newsletter to follow the future development of CPT closely here: http://www.chesspositiontrainer.com/english/Support/Newsletter.aspx More information about CPT can be found on the homepage: http://www.chesspositiontrainer.com/
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