Chessmaster 10

[Navaros]

I have had Chessmaster 10 for a long time.

The Josh Waitzkin tutorials are very well-done, except I think they really skimped-over strategy for openings and the middle-game. Teaching you almost nothing about openings or the middle-game at all.

I wish he would have spent vastly more time on teaching strategy about that.

I went back and and looked at some of the "Chessmaster Series" tutorials that are also included with Chessmaster 10, and I noticed that those go into more depth with openings. But that trainer is much more boring to listen to than Josh is IMO, and plus some of his reasoning is not explained. Just the other week I was going over the tutorial for Black's responses to White's second move and sometimes you are supposed to make moves contrary to the principles. Yet in other almost-identical looking situations, you are are supposed to stick with the principles. Some of those situations really left me confused, especially since they are not always adequately explained in the tutorial.

In terms of actually playing Chess with it, I found the "game analysis" feature at the end of the game to be totally useless. I was expecting it would tell me what I did wrong, and why what I did was wrong. It definitely didn't even try to do that.

I don't like playing vs. the AI opponents because I find they are very hard to beat. I'm probably "average" at playing Chess; meaning I play about as well as an average person who is not all that familiar Chess would play. The impression I got after playing a lot vs. the AI in Chessmaster 10 was that the "it's a computer who makes perfect calculations that I can't compete with!" factor really started to aggravate me. Then so that lower level AI opponents give off the illusion of being bad players, the AI is programmed to make ridiculously-boneheaded moves with the lower level AI opponents. Which also frustrates me in the same way, because a real human probably would not make such blatantly boneheaded moves.

I was hoping Chessmaster 10 would teach me the real nitty-gritty of how to become a Chess expert. I have found that in my case, the program leaves me with more questions about Chess than it provides answers for. And the lack of a detailed game analysis tool leaves me in the dark about what I did wrong after playing a game.

I was thinking about trying Fritz Chess, but I am not sure if I would run into the same obstacles with that. It's really hard to tell based on reading reviews of the program.

Having said all that, I don't hate Chessmaster 10. It's a good program. I guess I was just expecting it to do more than what it was actually able to do for me.