What is Reddit's opinion of Shredder Chess?

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Any time you have an endgame problem with 6 pieces or less (including kinds) you can use an endgame database like this In your game yes it is a theoretical draw if black and white play correctly.

if you want to get better, it's not just about playing. you need to study chess, by reading books, watching videos, looking up your openings, practicing tactics/endgames.

and practice better redditing, put a better title next time.

here are some good videos that cover most of the openings you will see, very helpful

and here's a huge opening database that you can explore and try different variations

You can memorize all the openings you want, but if you don't understand the theory behind the moves, then you'll probably get slaughtered during the middle game, especially if they do something unexpected. There are so many combinations that it will very likely occur.

Memorizing end games may help, but I think there are just so many combinations that realistically only a handful will ever come up. So then begs the question, how do you know what to memorize? It'll be like winning the lottery. Learning the theory is much more time-effective and enjoyable, like how to play Rook Pawn end games, etc.

>Would this be possible?

According to this: http://www.shredderchess.com/online-chess/online-databases/endgame-database-info.html The endgame tables used here are greater than 1 Terrabyte of data, and that's just for 6 pieces. The openings have even more combinations, so good luck memorizing those.

>Are there any examples of this?

Many pros definitely study/memorize openings, maybe to the extent that you are thinking of, but they tend to remember a lot about their past games through theory and practice. As an example of great preparation check out Anand vs. Aronian @ Tata Steel 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCrU9410vSo Anand plays some crazy moves, but he knows that they are sound due to prior preparation.

Computers just do what you program them to do, and you can program them to make mistakes. Shredder for example plays "like a human" and makes typical errors.

For endgames with 6 or fewer pieces (including kings), you can use a tablebase to get a definitive result whether it's won, drawn, or lost (e.g. this one). Here it confirms that it's drawn. Of course, knowing the theoretical result is only half the battle, and you usually want to know what the winning/drawing line or strategy is as well. But it's pretty clear in this position: black can just camp his king by the pawn and prevent it from advancing, so white can't win, and there's no way black will be able to win with the rook against the bishop.

You couldn't have won. From that position it's a draw at most with best play. When you have 6 or less pieces on the board, you can check for best lines of play with a tablebase

According to 6-piece tablebases, which you can play with here, white has one drawing move: Rf1. All other moves lose.

Hey I've taught scholastic chess and been around it for over 10 years, one of the easiest and most fun ways to get better are chess puzzles. (http://www.shredderchess.com/daily-chess-puzzle.html) Doing 10 a day, on top of playing lots of games will help you to see better moves throughout the game. It's also critical to study endgame theory, make sure you know how to checkmate with King and Queen, King and Rook, and for a bonus King and two Bishops (that ones tricky!). Finally, there are openings. You could spend a lifetime studying them, but more common ones to start with are Ruy Lopez, Italian Game, Sicilian Defense, French Defense, and Caro-Kann Defense and my personal favorite the Modern Defense. Look them up online, or get a book, it will teach you every popular opening out for quite a few moves, with all the traditional responses and counter options. Play, study, play some more. Good luck, and have fun.

This is what i was talking about. They would show you a chess board with pieces set in a certain way, and then it would ask you the next moves of a color to win.

have to support ivers0n on this, something that might help you a lot is to play through moves on a website like Shredders Opening Database, which always gives you the names of the opening on the board! it helped me greatly when i first explored the world of openings! Have fun exploring!

As far as the question in your title, it looks like you went wrong on move 59 with Kf8. The correct idea was getting your rook behind the pawns with Rc1.

You can check out the optimal moves using the Shredder endgame tablebases using the FEN

8/4k3/6P1/2r1PK2/5P2/8/8/8 b - - 0 1

i recommend looking up openings in a chess opening database site.

BTW, your resignation is a bit premature, after Bd6 black may be able to get some counter play against the white king despite being a piece down.

edit: i punished a similar opening in a game i played

I believe the Shredder app adjust itself according to your level. Having said that, I'm not sure of its accuracy in doing this. You can play it offline.

Edit: "You can adjust Shredder’s playing strength from beginner to master level. If you like, Shredder for iPhone automatically adjusts his strength to yours. He even calculates an Elo rating for you."
Source: http://www.shredderchess.com/chess-info/features/shredder-chess-iphone-features.html

Chess.

There are cheap and free programs out there with adjustable playing strengths. Shredder (1) is my favorite.

You can play on the screen, and plastic sets are cheap. Most places have a local chess club where you can meet others who play too. There are reams of books at the library and cheap ones at the used book stores.

1. http://www.shredderchess.com/

Are you sure you have the right picture? pasting 8/8/1k3p2/4bK2/P3R3/8/8/8 b - - 0 1 into the shredder tablebase gives a draw.

The second is very instructive. I would have fallen to it in an OTB game, because I missed Kc5-b5.

I had a similar endgame once, but unfortunately it was an 8 piece one so shredder cannot solve it. Here is the 6-piece version 8/2b5/8/8/6pk/8/4R1P1/7K w - - 0 1 without pawns on a5 and a7. The first move should be obvious, but it's not: getting king out of the corner is the first priority, but Kg1 actually just draws. After that it's 50 moves of complete bizarre dance until black can claim a draw due to 50 move rule.

Check out the shredder endgame tablebase. It was technically a win, but a complicated one that I don't understand all the moves in.

I have a ChessGames membership (although I got it through some Christmas clue hunt thing), and it's definitely useful. The opening explorer isn't anything special, but their "guess the move" thing is neat for when you want to go through Grandmaster games.

Have you checked out Shredder Chess's opening database yet, though? It's pretty useful too, just for seeing what openings are sound to play.

http://www.shredderchess.com/online-chess/online-databases/opening-database.html

is a wonderful resource. it doesn't accept pgn input, but it will tell you which opening was used if you enter the move sequence. it also accepts FEN sequences.

i did a bit of analysis here.

your opponent missed an early forced mate.

2. dxc4 is highly recommended, you trade your c pawn (not a center pawn) for his d pawn (a center pawn). b6 is not in the database.

but if you want to get better at chess, do tactics training on chesstempo instead of playing.

Shredder and Hiarcs are two popular packages that offer native MacOS engines and GUI

Fairly similar interface, features and price tag between the two.

Shredder has a demo setup of the classic version (weaker engine, but same interface as standard Shredder 13), while HIARCS has a bunch of demo videos

I missed this. I considered 1. Bg7 Nxb2 2. Bh6 and then putting the bishop to a3-c1 diagonal. The black king is trapped, he can only move the king, and the white king can move closer to enable the mate.

Unfortunately, there's one clever trick that saves black here. If you spot it, you can call this problem "rather easy". But I had to go an endgame database to see where my idea fails.

Have you looked at the engine output description? You can find it in the zip referenced on this page:

http://www.shredderchess.com/chess-info/features/uci-universal-chess-interface.html

It documents the different elements of the "info" line. You can use the javascript ".split(" ") function to break the line into an array of text chunks.

I'm the author of Chessvis. I use the PHP "explode" function to split the line up.

BTW, I've found the sequence of suggested moves to be pointless beyond the first one or so. I.e., if you feed the next position in the sequence into engine as a fresh new position, you'll probably get a different suggested move.

Henry

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However, there are tablebases, such as Shredder for all positions involving up to 6 pieces (including the kings).

I got a gold membership shortly after starting to play on that site, just because the performance is so much better (page refreshes never time out, serve up quicker), and to get rid of the ads. After a while I upgraded to platinum because I was running against the 25 tactics per day limit. If I didn't already have a copy of Shredder 12 which I use to do game post-mortems, I'd probably have upgraded to diamond for the unlimited computer analysis. I'm tempted to upgrade for chess mentor, but I suspect that it would just tell me what I think I already know - I need to work on tactics.

Thanks! I ended up trying shredder chess online and then bought the Android app for now. It's got suggestions, adapts to your style and has tactics you can try.

> Really? How? Since 2 knights don't force mate, that's difficult to believe.

Not sure what two knights have to do with anything -- the weaker side obviously can't force a trade.

Three knights always win against one knight (plug in a few random 3N vs N positions in here if you don't believe me), but the situation is so rare that I was surprised that the win was so straightforward.

I use Shredder Chess for Android and love it. It automatically increases/decreases your ELO score the more you play, so you can see where exactly your skill level is. There's also tactics so you can practice solving problems. It's $8. There's an app for the IPhone as well.

http://www.shredderchess.com/

EDIT: Forgot to mention, you can only play the computer. You can't play each other with this app.

I started out with Chessmaster 9000 Mac which I got in the Feral Family Fun Pack 3 (which was the only way to get Chessmaster that I knew of, at the time). The main problems I had with Chessmaster (on the Mac, at least) were that it insists on having the DVD in the drive to run, and it was a bit crashy. It has all the tutorials and advice, and a chess coach that will provide post game analysis in prose form (i.e. this was your worst mistake, rather than just an alternate lines with associated values). I should mention that I had to go to their website and download a 'patch' after I installed, which was essentially a whole new copy that upgraded it to run on the current version of OS X much better.

Now I am using Deep Shredder 12 Mac. It does not have tutorials and advice, but it doesn't crash and doesn't require install media as copy protection.

Shredder Chess has some pretty good puzzles and three levels of difficulty against a computer. EDIT: This is from an average player and can beat the medium setting on this site.

OP...is this a decent site?