Openings Encyclopedia 2011 released
Openings Encyclopedia 2011 has been recently released ans is available at our online shop. It includes theoretical material on every opening, a user-friendly and detailed classification of variations, a quick search option and an option for analyzing games and positions. Openings material is based upon 500,000 of expert evaluations, 8,000 annotations to key moves , 40 million of evaluations by Rybka engine, and database of 4,350,000 games as of April 1, 2011. For download — €25.60 / $32 On DVD — €31.96 / $39.95

Aquarium 4.0.7 update with Rybka 4.1 released

We are glad to inform you that Aquarium 4.0.7 update is released.

There are no major visible changes in it. But there are a lot of fixes inside. We were working hard and about a hundred of different fixes were done to provide this release.

Two important issues that were solved are:

1. Minimax process in IDeA became times faster. This is especaily visible when you operate with a lot of positions (like 100 000 and more).
2. Game analysis with large time control worked too fast in previous builds and didn’t provide expected quality.

Read the rest of this entry »

Special Offers in our Shop
Offers are valid from March, 11th.

1. Order Chess Assistant 11 Starter, Professional, Mega or upgrade packages and get Internet Game Services 2011 (3000 new games each week) and 2010 for free .
2. Order any two books costing more than $15/€12 and get a third book of your choice (in the price range of the first two) free.

Amber Blindfold and Rapid tournament 2011
The 20th and final traditional TopGM’s blindfold and rapid tournament in Nice, France will be held from March 11th to 25th. Players: Viswanathan Anand (India), Magnus Carlsen (Norway), Levon Aronian (Armenia), Vladimir Kramnik (Russia), Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria), Alexander Grischuk (Russia), Vasily Ivanchuk (Ukraine), Sergey Karjakin (Russia), Boris Gelfand (Israel), Hikaru Nakamura (United States), Vugar Gashimov (Azerbaijan) and Anish Giri (Netherlands) ChessOK will broadcast all games of the tournament [–table–] Games: Round 1 [ PGN], Round 2 [ PGN], Round 3 [ PGN], Round 4 [ PGN], Round 5 [ PGN], Round 6 [ PGN], Round 7 [ PGN], Round 8 [ PGN], Round 9 [ PGN], Round 10 [ PGN], Round 11 [ PGN]

Chess Tactics for Beginners 2.0
— Chess Tactics for Beginners 2.0 (on CD, for download) has been released just recently featuring convenient user interface and adding 918 new training exercises. The training program is designed for teaching children, either in groups with a teacher or at home guided by parents. It covers a lot of ground, starting from the very first steps. There are altogether more than 2200 tactical exercises classified by theme and difficulty ensuring variety and a good understanding of basic tactics.

Dadi Jonsson’s article on CT-ART: Mating Combinations
CT-ART: Mating Combinations is a new training course. The “CT-ART” label indicates that it is a tactics training course, but more importantly that it is of the same quality class as the original and popular CT-ART. The author of this new training course is Victor Khenkin, an experienced and respected chess coach.

As all new training courses, Mating Combinations runs in the Peshka interface as shown in the following graphic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Aquarium 4.0.6 Released

The long-awaited Aquarium 4.0.6 patch was finally released at the end of December. This is a huge update, involving more than one thousand changes, some of them major.

There is plenty of information available on the Internet about the new version, including several of my columns from last year. I think it’s time to give a high-level overview of this new version based on what has been written about it since the first hints of expected improvements appeared more than six months ago. The changes in the new version fall into these major categories:

• New features, many of which have been described in previous ChessOK Cafe columns. I know that many users appreciated seeing their suggestions being implemented in this version.
• Usability improvements, including a more responsive user interface and a more streamlined implementation of several features. Again, these changes were often based on user feedback.
• Major redesign of the internal structure of important components of the program. These changes are not immediately obvious, but affect the ability of Aquarium to handle large amounts of data, improve performance of some time consuming operations, reduce resource requirements, decrease start up time when there are many open databases, games, IDeA projects, etc. Language support was also redesigned making, it easier to translate Aquarium to different languages.
• And last but not least, bug fixes.
Read the rest of this entry »

”Play Like Mikhail Botvinnik” training course released for free!
This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 6th World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik. In honor of World Champion, ChessOK releases a free training course ”Play Like Mikhail Botvinnik” in Peshka interface. Learn to play like the 6th World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik in 350 most interesting and instructive positions from his games! This course also features 1.069 games played by Botvinnik from 1924 till 1970. The games are deeply annotated by GM Alexander Khalifman, FIDE World Champion’1999 and IM Sergey Soloviev. DOWNLOAD Three more courses from ”Play Like World Champion” series (Lasker, Capablanca and Spassky) are available in our shop for as low as $15.