Using Arena?

Can somebody teach me how to use arena? I want to analyze my games and I've got as far as getting the game into the engine... But how do I understand the output? Why doesn't it tell me if I made a blunder or better yet, what a better move was?

Can someone please help me?

I'm using arena as the graphical interface and houdini as the engine. If that helps..

I dont use arena but

So basically,

Once you turn the engine on, you get a number, a symbol, and a lines, correct?

Well lets say ur white and its something like this:

+/= (0.43) (and then a line...)

That means you have a slight advantage (thats what +/= stands for) and its approximately 4/10 of a pawn.

And then you make a terrible blunder and once u go to the next move it becomes...

-+ (-1.87) (...) you know you've made a really really bad move bc the evaluation changed in blacks favor (thats what the negative sign means) and now the engine evaluates Black almost 2 pawns ahead...

Hope this helps :)

Here is a key btw: (the / wont show up in the engine if its +/= lets say then the = is below the +)

+-....White has a decisive advantage and it can win the game

+/-....White has a nice advantage, not totally winning yet but its quite good

+/=....White has a slight advantage

=....Its equal

And now you will see negative numbers bc its in Black's favor

=/+....Black has a slight advantage

-/+....Black has a nice advantage, not totally winning yet but its quite good

-+....Black has a decisive advantage and it can win the game

Depending on the delta between the evaluation, someone has made a mistake (only if its like significant not like a small fluctuation)

The delta (difference) between the evaluation tells you how bad the mistake is...

So if ur white and the number in brackets goes up, Black made a mistake

If your white and the number goes down, you made a mistake

If your black and the number goes down, white made a mistake.......and so on

***Also lemee add in that this is a very basic way to get started using an engine to analyze your games....Strong players know not to trust the engine every single time especially when the situation is more positional than tactical***

The engine will always be correct when a tactical mistake is made...not necessarily positional

1. select the games which you want to analyse and click download pgn from chess.com. then open your mail box and save them to a specific folder

2. extract your houdini from the zip folder

3. open arena.exe and select your language

4. click engine and select install new engine

5. browse for you houdini which you had extracted

6. click on pgn and select open, then look for the games which you had saved

7. now click on analyse and play your moves

this is the same question that i am having with arena. i recently got arena with houdini 2.0 pro and i used to have fritz 13.

in fritz, you could just press full analysis and it would give full variations and also comments on if this was a bad move or not.

is there any way to do that with houdini and arena bacuase I heard that houdini is a better engine and arena is a good gui.

Arena is OK if you just need to do a quick automatic analysis or just need to find out where you blundered, and maybe find some better lines. But if you're going to really get into lots of annotations and adding variation lines to pgn files, I wouldn't recommend Arena. Scid (or Scid vs. PC) would be better in that case, or just go back to Fritzy.

But if you want to use Arena, just play around with it. Read the help, try out menu items to see what they do. You [probably] won't break anything.

Arena won't give you words, though. Only variations, evaluation numbers, and evaluation symbols. It's up to you to know what to do with the information.

okay, thanks. can you tell me how to use the annotation things in scid becuase I'm sorta a noob when it comes to chess programs. 

thanks...