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Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Chess Opening Analyzer

     According to the author this program was created to help analyze certain material and positional elements during the Opening:

Center Domination
Control Point Count
Space Count
Territorial Domination
Castled King
Connected Rooks

      To do this he has used methods that Yasser Seirawan teaches about in his Winning Chess series of books, but this program speeds up the process because you don’t need a pencil and paper to do the math. Any chess engine will give you a numerical evaluation of the position, but it apparently is the purpose of this software to break down the individual elements of the position. I am not sure what value this information is because I have not read Seirawan’s books.
      Also, I am not sure how the ‘position score’ would correlate with an engine evaluation, if at all. Years ago there was a book, Point Count Chess: An Accurate Guide to Winning Chess, by Horowitz and Mott-Smith. There was also an introduction by Reshevsky, but that didn’t mean anything because I suspect the intro was written by one of the authors and they gave Reshevsky a hundred dollars to use his name.
      According to the publisher’s blurb, these days, the book is ‘highly recommended by a large number of chess coaches and trainers.’ I seriously doubt that.
      Chess Opening Analyzer appears to be an attempt to do this for the opening, but I don’t know why it wouldn’t give an evaluation for any position. In any case, even though I’m not sure how useful any information provided by this program might be, I am tossing the information out for anybody who might be interested. If you want to download the program and perhaps provide the author with some feedback, here’s the link. LINK

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