ChessBase 13 Pro

Overall I have to give a marginal thumbs-down for this software, even at the sale price of 75% off. The chess games database itself is good, and the analysis features are nice, so these may make the purchase worthwhile to you, but there are a lot of things missing for this to be considered a "Pro" version, for example no endgame tablebases are included, you have to download them from either here https://chess.cygnitec.com/tablebases/ or via a torrent listed here http://oics.olympuschess.com/tracker/ uncompress them and configure them yourself in the File -> Options -> Tablebases. Remember that this is in the "SOFTWARE" category under your LIBRARY menu, not in the "GAMES" category. If you don't realize this, you might waste some time trying to find "ChessBase 13 Pro" after you've installed it. The developer doesn't appear to have put much thought into this Steam release. For example, the Steam installer doesn't install the Mega 2016 database for you. You need to go into "ChessBase 13 Pro - Properties" and click on the "BROWSE LOCAL FILES..." button and inside there you'll find a directory called "Mega2016_Database_Setup" and inside that directory there's an installer application called "SetupMega2016" click on this to install it, and it'll complete with this message: "Mega Database 2016 has been installed on your computer." After that, the database will appear as a new icon in the "Home" tab's "My Databases" pane, alongside the "Big Database 2014" icon. If you don't do this, you'd be missing around 673,854 games, which is kinda a lot considering you only get around thirty thousand games for each of your hard-earned dollars! The "Mega Database 2016" contains 6,466,288 games. The "Big Database 2014" contains 5,792,434 games. It's not clear how the developer intends to supply updates to the game database, as there is no DLC for this software. Perhaps they expect the Steam Community to update their game databases manually from public sources such as The World in Chess? But doing that would seem quite labor-intensive. The developer would have had a much more favorable review if they allowed the Steam Community to update the game database over time, considering that many other Steam products are constantly being updated by their developers. There is a manual provided for this extremely complex (yet very useful) database software product. To find the manual for this specific version, you can go into "ChessBase 13 Pro - Properties" and click on the "BROWSE LOCAL FILES..." button and inside there you'll find a directory called "Manual" and you'll find a PDF file called "eng" which is the manual for ChessBase 13 Pro. Getting the software working with the DGT eBoard isn't obvious to newcomers, yet it's the first thing you'll want to do when deciding whether to keep the product, since you need to check whether it works properly or not (the Fritz 14 software on Steam was glitchy for me with the DGT board, whereas ChessBase 13 works well). To configure the DGT eBoard, you need to go to the "Board" tab and make sure that the DGT board checkbox is clicked. Unfortunately, the "Board" tab disappears if you start clicking around on any of the functionality, so be careful when you first open the program and look for the "Board" tab and click the DGT checkbox first. You apparently have to click the DGT checkbox EVERY TIME YOU START THE SOFTWARE!! This is quite bizarre, something so fundamental as an external USB interface should be a savable setting, not something you have to hunt for in the bizarre tabbed menu system each time you start the program. To setup a position using the DGT eBoard, you have to remove BOTH of the kings from the board and place them both back again, placing back last the king of the color whose move it is to play (otherwise the analysis will start analysing based on thinking the opposite side gets to move. The software doesn't even prompt you to ask if you made a mistake in the setup, which seems very silly when the analysis can see very well that the best move is something like a checkmate in a small number of moves -- why would a human need to run an analysis on a position like that, shouldn't the software prompt to ask if the move belongs to the other side, before spending all the CPU time to perform in-depth analysis?) Setting up a position on the DGT eBoard (e.g. the position shown on page 12 of the book "Understanding the Modern Defence" by David Norwood) and then attempting to search for this position in the database using the "Home" -> Double-click on the "Mega Database 2016" -> "Filter List" -> "Position" tab -> "Copy board" button -> OK it fails to find the position unless you remember to change the value of "Last" to a higher value such as 300. The same thing happens without the DGT eBoard if you use the "File" -> "New" -> "Position set up" menu to set up the position. If you use "File" -> "New" -> "New board in database" and enter each of the moves all the way up to the same position in the game that actually is in the database (in this case, it's game 620129, position 11), using the "Copy position" button and then performing the search using that position, it finds the correct game. So the setting for "Last" is important in the "Filter Games" dialog box, it needs more explanation. Also, the "Copy board" button under the "Position" tab of the "Filter List" menu is improperly named, it should be "Paste position" because the position is not necessarily from the DGT eBoard, it's just using whatever chess position happens to be stored in the clipboard. Update: I found that the search works properly when right-clicking on the board image and selecting the "Find Position in Mega Database 2016..." menu item, because when searching that way it automatically sets the "Last" value to 300 (but another bug is that this menu item vanishes if you create a database of your own, leaving you with only the "Find Position in Big Database 2014..." menu item corresponding to the Shift+F7 shortcut). Severe bugs: - After endgame tablebases are installed, setting up an endgame position and clicking the Deep Analysis button causes the ChessBase 13 to hang, whereas Fritz 15 works OK and immediately shows the moves to mate. Slight bugs which reflect a lack of attention from the developer. - The CPU meter in the bottom-right of the window is showing 100% most of the time, even when the program is not performing any analysis. - When double-clicking to open a game in a new window, the notation section is sometimes randomly empty. Repeating the same action, the notation section may be populated. - The tooltip for the "File" menu still says "Application Menu" (it had this name in the past, but they forgot to update the tooltip, and also many occurrences of "application menu" in the manual itself). The "File" menu is modal: the "New" will offer either "Board Window" or "Database" depending on where you invoke it from, which is confusing. - The game number (the unique database index of the game) is not shown in the title of the window when that game is open, nor can it be used as a search criteria (as far as I can tell). This approach is bizarre for a database program, normally the unique primary key would be a convenient way to quickly get back to a specific database record. There doesn't appear to be any way to mark specific games that you've studied as your "favorites". - The "Help" tab's tempting-looking blue "Support Website" button (with a nice big question mark in it) lands up on the following page, which clearly needs some support itself as it only gives the following error: "Server Error in '/' Application." http://support.chessbase.com/?Name=ChessBase%2013 It should instead redirect (or be updated to refer to) their new support site: https://en.chessbase.com/pages/support