0.00000125 Trillion Games "MasterChess 2000", CD-ROM computer software, Chess4Less, USA, $49.00 Reviewed by Paul Kollar I remember, from the old days before CD's, a funny bit by the comedian Robert Klein. Portraying a manic, fast-talking, hyper- aggressive TV salesman, the type we used to see during the many commercial breaks that punctuated late-night movies on second- rate stations, Klein was pushing a unique set of audio records. He offered, probably for three easy payments of $99.99, "Every record that was ever made!! Records beginning with the letter "C"; records by women; records by every artist you ever knew, alive or dead!" And so on. "A truck will come to your door! Act now and get a free ice crusher!" Perhaps you had to be there. Chess4Less isn't offering every chess game ever played, only a million, two hundred and fifty thousand. Compared to the fabled number of all possible chess games, a number, I'm told, that is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, the "Ultimate Game Collection IV" included with MasterChess 2000 is rather meager. Compared with everything else in the way of game collections, it's a really big deal. Imagine, if you will, a million games of chess imagine 1.25 million for that matter. I like that " .25 ", or "1/4" cute little fractions. That's 250,000 games! We'll start with that. That's the equivalent of two thousand, five hundred copies of Botvinnik's One Hundred Selected Games. A truck will come to your door. That's one hundred very busy Grandmasters' lifetime efforts. And that's just the fraction. Let's quintuple that to return to the big enchilada, the 1,250,000 set. Printed out in PGN format on standard office stock from a smokin' laser printer, that many games would result in a stack 125 feet high. Embodied in, say, Informants, the collection would call for a shelf 150 feet wide inquire at IKEA. I know guys who have been diligently, religiously playing 5-minute chess every week at the club for five or six hours, fifty weeks a year for three decades. They have each played, by contrast, "only" 50,000 games since 1969. I, myself, have played about 4500 blitz games on the Internet Chess Club in the last twelve months. At that rate I'll have 1.25 million ICC speed games to my credit in the year 2277. A really big deal then, quantitatively, this "ultimate" game collection. Qualitatively the collection is equally impressive. It covers the years 1485 through September 1999, from the age when Ruy Lopez himself was just getting used to castling as we now know it and accommodating his game to the "mad Queen", to just a few weeks ago, post Vegas. Everybody's in there: the Great Thirteen (is Khalifman really the 14th World Champion?); their challengers and also-rans and never-rans; all the Masters, past and present; the "founding Fathers" (Ruy Lopez, Polerio, Greco, Philidor); the "pre-Morphy-alites", the post-industrialites, you name it they're there, even correspondence players and computers. It's smorgasbord! George Walker, Napoleon, Cochrane, Von der Lasa, Max Lange, Marcel Duchamp, Tringov, Dus Chotimirsky, De Vere, Tolstoy, Cuellar, Lowenfisch, Herman Steiner, George Olte of Connecticut (?!), EVERYBODY! Well, all right, I couldn't find Paolo Boi. It would appear, simply, that every "important" recorded chess game is included in this un- annotated collection, and plenty of less important curiosities as well. The collection is heavily weighted toward the current end of that time-line, and that's both natural and understandable, and beneficial to theorists and students of the opening without actually slighting, overmuch, antiquarians and historians. Although I would vote for more antique games and for more contests from the "Golden Age", I don't know that they are there to find and amass. Some random counts: · 1485 1850 Pre-London 1851 905 · 1851 1914 Anderssen to WWI 16625 · 1919 1939 Between WWI and WWII 20629 · 1957 1972 Fischer Era 81137 · 1985 1990 K vs K Era 254372 · 1994 - 1999 Post FIDE fracture 449160 So, if you're attracted to such a massive collection and ready to possess this treasure, a bonanza unthinkable before the "information age" fell upon us, will a truck pull up to your receiving department with hundreds of cartons of books? And when you put it on your reinforced bookshelves, what then, how do you deal with it, just how do you find and extract what you're currently looking for, with a shovel? How do you merely browse? Must you hire a staff? Well, most of you have guessed it: thanks to the PC revolution and the magic of electronic storage media, specifically the CD, what you get comes delivered in a small mailing envelope and weighs less than a bag of chips, BUT calls for (surprise) a PC with a CD- ROM drive. And, please note that you get more, much more, than a mere pile of games. Forgive me for having read the "readme" file that accompanied the software (I know that is never done), but I would like to quote Chess4Less' beautifully succinct description of their marvelous product, "MasterChess 2000". Excuse also, please, my bracketed elaborations they are really not meant to spoil the pure, almost clinical, technical introduction: MasterChess is a collection of over one million chess games [Ultimate Game Collection IV the database] and a program that searches them [Super Essentia] and gives analysis for them using a chess engine [Zarkov 4.6 est. ELO 2525 blitz 2800+] (which you can also play against). You can find games by player name, year, ECO opening code, the game result, and the move order. You can also have MasterChess generate all known move orders from a tree of grandmaster games to help find any games with the same position but a different move order. MasterChess can export games to PGN files for use in other programs such as Bookup, Chessbase, and most playing programs. The search/extract/display program, or database manipulator (your staff), Super Essentia is, in fact, super. I have been examining it for hours, for days, and I am, despite a lingering aversion to computers, amazed and delighted with it. I feel like Scrooge McDuck burrowing and wallowing in his money bin, loving every little coin and greenback. Searches are effected in seconds, or, at most, a minute or two. If you can spare 650 MB on your hard drive, you can copy the entire database from the CD, and your searches will really zoom. There is no apparent limit to the resultant sizes of the queries, and they can be combined, or extracted to PGN files or displayed and examined and/or analyzed. I can't stop searching, and I have discovered many entertaining and unsuspected facts and relationships that I was completely unaware of. You will too, and even if you emphasize opening research, you will be unable to determine if this 44 dollar, complete and utter bargain is a tool or a toy, or a kind of Occam's Razor. As for Zarkov, while not quite as flexible and feature-rich as some of the other commercial chessplaying software that many of us are familiar with, I can solemnly assure you that it's strength is as advertised. I was repeatedly eviscerated by Zarkov and made to look foolish despite many ingenious attempts on my part to create and inflict totally unfair time handicaps on it. Mollified only slightly by the options of light and dark square color choices, 3D or 2D display boards in varying sizes, and a Fischer/increment clock, I am still nettled by the inability to give the damnable thing less than 1 minute for its entire vicious game. Please let me show you some of my noodling as a means to unveil a little of MasterChess 2000 (and kindly old Zarkov). I thought I'd begin by testing the database for absolute comprehensiveness by searching for a game that was somewhat obscure and totally inconsequential, perhaps even apocryphal. Alekhine, the story goes, once won a consultation game against four "allies" in six moves, mating. The moves: 1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 (or Nd2) dxe4 4. Nxe4 Nd2 5. Qe2 Ngf6 ??? 6. Nd6 mate. One wishes the consultation had been recorded verbatim. Photos of the faces of the allies would have been welcome as well. After starting the program and choosing SEARCH from the initial menu, I filled out the "Search for Games" screen (or window) as seen below, electing to search by move order, taking care to click on "all possible move orders" to cover the alternative 3rd white move. Please note that there was another window, not seen here, that permitted me to enter just the first five moves I did not enter the coup de grace. INSERT WINDOWS PAINT FILE MC2000_1.bmp HERE As you can see, I left the Player name, ECO code, and Year "dialogue" boxes blank, and leaving Results as 1-0, 0-1, draw. This was to be strictly by move order / resultant position. A mouse click on the big OK button led to the following display in 4 seconds. You may expect longer move sequences to take more time. INSERT WINDOWS PAINT FILE MC2000_2.bmp HERE Alas, the Alekhine v "Allies" purported game was not found, but nine other games popped out, some of them rather current despite advances in Caro-Kann theory since Alekhine. Notice, please, the draw. But before you criticize Hosticka for missing the theoretical best move, you should be aware that Knox also preferred to eschew the crass and brutal Nd6 mate and set a 13-year precedent for Hosticka by playing the much more subtle 6. Nxf6+, and won in 29 moves just the same. Turning from the ridiculous to the sublime, let's look at a more serious search and some Zarkovian analysis. The next (and last) sample search was for one of the best K vs K games of all time, an incredibly complicated Ruy that Kasparov won, as white, in the London-Leningrad 1986 World Championship match. In his book of the match, Kasparov devoted pages and pages of analysis to this game, especially Karpov's 25th move. I wanted to find the game for Zarkov's opinion of that critical juncture. I happened to know it was the 16th game but asked Super Essentia to look for the game per the parameters seen in the next screen representation, as if that limited information was all I had to go on. INSERT WINDOWS PAINT FILE MC2000_4.bmp HERE After 12 seconds the program found two games that matched the params. Highlighting (or selecting) the one in question from the resultant "Game List" window, and clicking on the "Load Game" button led to the display replicated below after I stepped through the moves to Black (Karpov) on the move after White's 25th. INSERT WINDOWS PAINT FILE MC2000_5.bmp HERE This "snapshot", taken after just a few minutes of Zarkov's perusal of the position shows a few items of consideration. While Karpov would eventually play 25. Nbd3, Zarkov, at least after 8 ply, agrees with Kasparov that Ncd3 is the move. (I saw Zarkov examine and reject Nbd3 almost instantly). Kasparov writes that after 25. Nbd3, which "looks" right, White could play 26. Qc2 and most likely win Ncd3 prevents that queen move. Karpov took 62 minutes to play his move; Kasparov later wrote and wrote about it, having played 26. Ng4, and slapped himself with a "?" for missing Qc2!! Zarkov finds the correct knight move in a few minutes, probably spotting 25. ...Nbd3 26. Qc2, and adjudges the position 67+ for white, or 2/3 of a pawn up probably drawn. Go figure. To coin a phrase, the possibilities are endless with this wondrously fine product. I cannot imagine a better bang for the buck. Sure, there are bound to be flaws, errors, and shortcomings here and there misspellings, omissions, duplications some few out of a million. One cannot extract all of a given player's games in a single pass he or she cannot be both white and black simultaneously. One cannot search for games on the basis of material present on the board (e.g. R v N endgames) as can the (much) more expensive software ensembles. There are stronger chess playing programs. I can and will overlook all that, however, and I am unequivocally endorsing and recommending MasterChess 2000 to one and all. It's hot stuff and a stone gas! Have fun with it. And learn something. Post Script: Credit where credit is due segment: Paul Azzurro Producer John Stanback Chess Engine Ken Panzel Game Editor Mike Leahy Programmer Bill Haines Opening Books Check out: www.chess4less.com Reviewing aid: Compaq Presario 4528 64 MB 233 Mhz Pentium Windows 95 Post Post Script: I asked the Chess4Less guys if they would consider creating a database consisting of games played by members of my chess club over these many years, mostly blitz. To narrow it down, I suggested including only those games that were eventually won by the player who was losing practically throughout the whole game, but won anyway by sheer luck, or solely by the clock. I was informed that such a collection would take ten CD's the size of manhole covers. You probably had to be there.