Chess Position Trainer

I just downloaded Chess Position Trainer. I would like to ask this community to give me their opinions of it and any tips for using it. Thanks for the help, it's what keeps me on chess.com

Its mainly for setting up opening moves  repertrois. Its alright, chessmaster is better because the opening moves are already entered.

Basically its a memorizing tool. Helps you remember the sequence of moves of your preferred system/repertoire. You can add variations within the repertoire. You can plug-in a chess engine such as crafty to do kibitzing and recommend moves.

There are some setbacks too (but only minor ones). It could get too slow if your repertoire is too big and has many text annotations. Loading could get very slow too.

But all in all it's an excellent tool to remember your repertoires. --but a friend of mine said you can do that too on Chess Master or Fritz so why bother? -I dont know.

It's a tool for memorizing an opening repertoire. It's not as slick as Chess Opening Wizard, but it's good and happens to be free, so you can't complain. A word of warning: hopefully you're memorizing openings lines because you enjoy the process, because at the 900-elo level it is at least 10x slower than other methods of improving.

dlordmagic> chessmaster is better because the opening moves are already entered.

Chessmaster's pre-loaded repertoire is minimal. For example, after 1.e4 d5 it only considers 2.exd5. With tools like CPT or COW you can flesh out your repertoire by adding alternatives and writing narratives (or drawing diagrams) for them.

I am beginning to see that it's a great tool for helping me memorize my openings. It's does have a nice feel to it. Thanks for the input

I'm not a big fan of "memorizing" openings.  It is better to use CPT (or better yet Chess Openings Wizard, Chess Assistant or Aquarium) to look for holes in your repertoire, lines where you always seem to lose, and then try to figure out improvements that you can try, and analyze these new lines to see if they actually are better.

I've been using Personal Chess Trainer a great deal. Like Rigamagician, I'm not a fan of memorizing openings. I'm not a fan for two reasons:

1. I am not an advanced player and tend to play others who play too many different openings for me to memorize. I stick to the basic opening prinicles and try to keep it simple.

2. All it takes is one off move by your opponent in the opening and you're stuck trying to figure out what the proper response is.

I'm too much of a dope at this point. I have to keep it simple!