I eventually started playing for club teams in the county league. Time constraints for these matches, played on weekday evenings when many of us have to get up for work,  means that games are sometimes left unfinished with the result subject to adjudication.  If no immediate agreement can be arrived at, the players retire to assess the result at home, typically by feeding the final position  into whatever copy of Fritz they have and letting it run for a random time period e.g. overnight. If after this the result is still not agreed, the games can be sent to a panel of strong players for a final verdict.  Once I had been in this position myself a few times I started to wonder how best to use chess software for adjudication (still not really cracked that one) and the seeds of an interest in chess engines were sown.
Once I’ve started obsessing about something I usually spend a lot of time reading about it online as well as spending too much money buying books and equipment, the books mostly left unread past the first chapter or two.  Increasingly during my browsing I would read references to mythical beasts with names such as Firebird or Stockfish, and eventually the mighty Rybka.  It appeared that with-it, in-the-know, serious kinds of chess players didn’t bother with Fritz anymore, apparently Grandmaster strength programs just weren’t good enough anymore. Not only that, many of these programs were open-source and free!!! Could this be true? Eventually it occurred to me to Google some of these names, and sure enough there it was, Firebird free to download.  After a bit more research and head scratching I had Firebird set up as an additional engine in Fritz and  sat back happy, but what had I achieved?  I lost interest in for a while but still read the odd reference to new engines, and to the controversy over whether programmers had stolen code from other open-source engines, which became particularly heated with regards to  the closed-source, commercial and world-beating Rybka(Rybka has since been banned from the World Computer Chess Championships,and titles it won from 2007-2010 revoked).
Back in the more mortal world of mid-Sussex chess, last season I was increasingly being asked to help adjudicate games for fellow club-mates, which rekindled my interest in software. I’d already dabbled with Stockfish which is another very strong, free engine, and had stumbled across Arena, the brilliant free chess GUI.   Now a new kid was on the block, Houdini written by Robert Houdart.  In an interview, the brilliant Grandmaster Peter Svidler was quoted as saying that if the fate of the planet rested on beating aliens at a game of chess, he would choose Houdini to defend mankind! I quickly discovered that Houdini was also open-source and freely downloadable  (the new version 2 is now commercial, more of this later, but version 1.5 is still available gratis if you follow the link).  Houdini became my engine of choice,  I was amazed that it was so easy to set up a brilliant computer chess environment without having to purchase a single piece of software. Whilst wrestling with a couple of tight endgame positions, I learnt about endgame tablebases and downloaded the Gaviota tables (about 60Gb) kindly hosted by Josh Shriver here. An engine’s strength is largely governed by the hardware being used, handily at my place of employment I have access to large numbers of PCs sporting fast, quad-core processors. This hardware, combined with Arena and Houdini, meant that I could quickly set up a chess computer with a playing strength way beyond the average home setup.  My chess may not have been improving, but I was enjoying the process of researching and learning how to use software that’s out there.

Recently I became obsessed with working out how to access chess engines via the internet; I’ve done quite a bit of research into setting up remote chess engines but I really need to do some testing before I can present something worthwhile, so keep an eye out for ‘Chess Engines part 2′. Bet you can’t wait.

I keep forgetting how much great stuff YouTube has on all manner of subjects, but recently I’ve been getting some reminders from Nigel Davies’s blog at The Chess Improver regarding chess content. Although - as far as I know - the BBC hasn’t kept its recordings of The Master Game, an enthusiast posted a lot (if not all) of the episodes on YouTube, presumably transferred from VHS. I didn’t watch these first time round but they are very entertaining e.g. Byrne facing a young Short “He would do that right in my time pressure! What a brat!”.The programmes give a nice insight into the players’ thinking and are very accessible; opening preparation was a lot different in those pre-database days! Search YouTube for ‘TVChess’ and you will get an idea what is on offer.

I filled the best part of a day following the 1982 competition. Although there are probably much deeper games on offer, the game between Miguel Quinteros and Walter Browne was the one I found most entertaining. Most of the excerpts are single episodes under half an hour in length, but this one is in two parts.

TVChess:The Master Game Quinteros-Browne 1982 Pt1

TVChess:The Master Game Quinteros-Browne 1982 Pt2

Geek Tip: I discovered recently that when setting up positions in Shredder, if you tap on a piece – say a Knight – when you tap on a square if you keep tapping you can cycle though white knight-black knight-clear square without having to tap back on the piece menu. This greatly speeds up position setup.

Conclusion: I think this a ‘must have’ chess app on Android, and probably for Apple devices as well (there is some competition here particularly tChess/tChesspro  which I will be covering soon). The main clincher for Android is the tactics puzzles, as I couldn’t find another Android-based tactics puzzle collection when I looked, whereas there are other offerings on Apple platforms.  I bought Shredder for iTouch, iPad and Android and haven’t been disappointed, it looks similar on all platforms and each has the same features as far as I have noticed.

… to my geeky chess-related blog.  It seems ‘geeks’ are almost cool now so maybe I don’t need to apologize for the moniker, but hand-in-hand with ‘chess’ the title ‘geekchess’ may conjure up some unfortunate stereotypes.  Fear not, I am human, and whilst perhaps not über-cool I’m certainly a rounded individual with at least a modicum of dress sense (there is another reason for use of the word geek which is related to my name, see more in ‘about’).

Technology and chess are by no means the only interests in my life, but chess software from a user’s perspective is an area in which I have garnered some knowledge and having explored the chess options on various gadgets I thought it would be fun to share my views.  Chess players are relatively spoilt these days; for quite a while now personal computers have given access to Grandmaster-rated opponents, extensive databases, learning tools and online play.  As I have recently been using various chess software offerings on several mobile platforms I thought this would be a good place to start, but I never stick to one subject for too long so in time I hope to cover lots of other ‘geekchess’ stuff. For one thing,  like much of the chess world I have woken up to the fact that Fritz is not the only chess engine in town and I am particularly interested at the moment in the use of remote chess engines.  Ultimately for chess players MS Windows is the operating system that is most extensively supported so there will be plenty of PC related stuff, mostly Windows-based with possibly a bit of Linux software if I get time (Macs don’t really cut it here I’m afraid, I don’t have one to try but Shredder is about the only decent offering I’ve seen available for OS X, and I’m basing that opinion on the mobile versions).  Chess servers will get a mention shortly as part of my overview of mobile applications, but they deserve consideration in their own right; other topics that spring to mind include good chess websites, live event coverage on the internet and Kindle books.

The ability to play live opponents - via an internet server – on a smartphone or tablet device is a potential nirvana hitherto associated with expensive dreams of DGT sensory boards (look, I know this sounds sad, but if you are into chess you WILL understand).  I think we are approaching the point where a tablet could be the ideal chess players tool, and following on from the advent of smartphones this means that - for me at least – chess on mobile apps is a hot topic.  I’ve recently moved from carrying an Apple iTouch to an Android phone, and have acquired a part share in an iPad 2, so I am fairly ambivalent as to the platform used and will try to remain impartial (at least until someone offers me a wad of cash to be biased).  Research has shown me that whilst it’s not too hard to find a list of, say, ’the best 5 iPhone chess apps’, there are not too many (if any) comparative guides as to the merits of apps across the platforms.  I believe I possess most if not all of the best apps out there, so my next posts will cover these.  Ultimately I hope to post some useful feature tables to make it easier to assess whether a particular piece of software is likely to meet your needs.

Thanks for reading, next post soon!