A Knowledgeable Chess Companion

The Chessmaster franchise has been around for ages. Whether or not, you have previous versions will not matter, because Chessmaster 10th Edition includes a major overhaul in design and perception. It is well suited for both amateurs who are just starting to pick up the game of chess and for veterans who wish to sharpen their game. Chessmaster 10th Edition includes various features and modes to benefit everyone with a love of chess.

Features

Chessmaster 10th Edition has, in this edition, divided itself to three subcategories. Play, Learn, and Fun. In the Play section, you can choose between rated play (and tournament play) against various human personalities, each with his or her own unique playing style. This makes the entire playing experience much less monotone for the starting player. Furthermore, every single game contributes to a rating, giving the player a solid feel for his progress as he masters his game.

The “Analyze” feature after every game allows for the player to learn from his mistakes as the Chessmaster engine analyzes move choices and rates each move. Related to this is a “Set up position” feature which allows players to import games from outside sources for analysis. I found this feature extremely important. With this feature, it doesn’t matter where online you play! Any move order can be imported and analyzed, which is a valuable tool.

There is also a “Training mode” where you play heads up against the Chessmaster engine, which possesses an official rating of 2927, which is Grandmaster level.

The “Puzzles” section provides numerous problems for chess enthusiasts to solve. These differ greatly in difficulty and require both time and patience to solve.

The online tournament feature allows players to connect with other chess enthusiasts online. However, this has often caused many problems. Ubisoft has not fully addressed issues regarding connectivity. Also, the online rankings are outdated and not regularly maintained. Playing online with Chessmaster 10th Edition tends to become a hassle. However, this problem can be easily addressed. In today’s day and age, there are numerous other places online to play chess. Some good ones are Yahoo! Games and chessclub.com. Both of these and many more offer places to play. (Remember games played on those sites may be imported into Chessmaster for analysis).

For both the Amateur and the Veteran

Chessmaster 10th Edition contains hours and hours of tutorials and lessons by none other than Josh Waitzkin and Larry Christiansen. Both are solid grandmasters. Josh Waitzkin focuses primarily upon the basic maneuvers and tactical analysis. Larry Christiansen is known throughout the chess world for his attacking abilities. Whatever level you are, you would benefit from going through these lessons. Each lesson includes audio so you can listen along instead of reading the screen.

I found these tutorials to be fairly helpful. The pace of each lesson is slow and separated into different pages so that the student may fast forward or rewind as he or she pleases.

Some Problems and Fixes

Patch 1.03 has allowed the use of Chessmaster 10th Edition without inserting the included CD Rom every time, which reduces the hassle. This patch may be downloaded at the Ubisoft website.

Ubisoft has posted on its forum a fix to the software process utilizing too much system resources.