ChessBase: Tutorial

Everyone knows the situation: you get some impressive new software, work happily with it for a year – and then suddenly discover that it can do way more than you thought. Why not find out straight away what it has to offer. ChessBase 16 has some incredible functions, designed to rapidly improve your playing strength and add to your Elo rating. Let a consummate power user show you how they work.

Tutorial and video (2:36 h) by IM Sagar Shah

Solving tactical puzzles can be fun, but what if you could automatically create your own, even from your own games? Nothing could be easier thanks to the analysis tools in both the Fritz interface or ChessBase. In fact, it can be a fun way to review your online games and be tested on the moves where you or your opponent missed a shot. Read on to learn how!

By Albert Silver

Knowing the ins and outs of annotating a game in ChessBase is one of the most fundamental and useful skills to have in it. It is vital so you can prepare openings, review your games, and more. Before stating you know all this, ask yourself: can you easily add text before a move, add symbols such as 'with attack', and add a '!' without a mouse? Let's start mastering the tools!

By Albert Silver

Adding symbols, evaluations and comments may be important, but without variations and moves to depict the possibilities that could have taken place or should have taken place, describing chess as a science would have no meaning. Yet knowing how to organize and re-organize those variations and moves sensibly and efficiently is no less essential. Learn how to do it like a pro!

By Albert Silver

While entering moves, writing comments, and evaluating positions are the most fundamental aspects of chess annotation, there is little doubt that illustrating the board with well-placed arrows, and timely highlighted squares can tell you in a glance you can see what is going on without a single variation or comment. Be sure to have these tools in your tool kit.

By Albert Silver

The ChessBase MegaDatabase 2022 contains around 9.2 million games, many of them by top players. Thanks to the ChessBase reference function the immense opening knowledge from these games is easily accessible. Thanks to the ChessBase search mask the same applies to the middlegame and endgame. But how does the search for positions work, e.g. for positions with an isolated queen pawn? You will quickly learn how powerful this tool is and how easy it is to use the search mask! Let's go.

Whether for in-class work or for homework, worksheets help students review and practice chess. Creating worksheets—then printing, formatting, and sharing them—are tasks that every chess coach undertakes. In this article, National Master Jeffrey Ashton shows how ChessBase makes these tasks easier.

Finding novelties is a fun way for students to learn how to use a database to annotate chess games. Novelties, loosely defined, are new moves but not necessarily good moves. National Master Jeffrey Ashton explains.

When you are solving an exercise in a book, or guessing a move in Solitaire Chess, and your move is wrong, the first thing you want to know is why it was wrong, and what the refutation was, but unless the author included your exact choice, you will be left scratching your head. A new feature in ChessBase solves this brilliantly and can become a powerful tool to your improvement.

Tutorial and video by Alber Silver