Chess Database & Analysis Software

From time to time discussions turn up here concerning the software that members use and/or recommend for playing, analyzing, studying and maintaining their databases. Many players are switching away from programmes installed on their PCs, and instead signing up to Lichess, Chessable or, oh yes, Chess.com! Others, myself included, prefer to have their own work stored on a PC or laptop.

A lot of advances have been made in the development of playing and database software over the years, but for me there is still not an ideal solution, and here's a rundown of the shortcomings of those I have tried or examined.

FREE SOFTWARE

Arena Chess - Quirky and out-of-date. I've not even tried it for some time, but I don't think it has been updated for several years, other than maybe sorting out a few bugs. I recall that making searches of databases was not flexible enough to be of much use. I also found it not to be very intuitive, but that could have been me not giving it enough time to familiarize myself.

ChessX - A nicer looking GUI than Arena, and I believe it is the basis upon which HIARCS chess explorer has been developed. However, again there is not enough flexibility in the database search facility. Another facet, from which most of these apps suffer, is that they have their own proprietary database format. Whilst they can read PGN files, a PGN database is "read only" unless you convert it. Then it can't be shared with other apps.

Lucas Chess - This is another rather dated GUI that is not the easiest on the eye. It does have an amazing array of functions that would grace a commercial app. Where it falls down is in annotating games and searching databases. It is possible to carry out a detailed search but, unless I've got it wrong, you have to filter the games in stages. You can't enter all the search criteria in one go.

Tarrasch - I love this programme if I just want a quick board to play through a game or two, with or without an engine. It does have a database facility, but forget it if you want to filter games or get analytical data.

SCID (SCID vs PC) - This comes closest to providing everything I want from an app. The GUI is customizable, it can store huge databases (I have one with over 7m games), and filters are faster even than Chessbase. Apart from a few minor niggles, the only objection to this being a serious contender is that it uses its own database format. It can handle PGNs, but they are "read only". Very frustrating.

COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE (£, $, €)

Chess Assistant - Not very expensive, and it probably does the job, but that GUI is ugly. It is to chess software what the Zenit camera was to photography! I have to confess to not having tried it, so I cannot comment on its performance. Perhaps someone would? I have also heard that Convekta/ChessOK support is rather poor. They do also produce a deep analysis app called Aquarium. Carl Bicknell is a fan (see his YouTube videos), despite the fact that it is prone to crashing, and hasn't been updated for about 10 years. They just change the date each year! There is also Chess King, which is OK for playing games since you can adjust the playing strength. The problem I find with this is that you can set it at a particular level and win most of the time. You set the level up a notch, and you get slaughtered. The database management and filtering is below par too.

Shredder - I have only tried the demo version of this programme, so my comments might not be valid for the full version. Why don't they give you full access so that you can evaluate the app properly? There's no direct access to a database. You have to select "load game" from the file menu. This allows you to open any pgn database, but to filter to a particular game or set of games, the options are limited. You can only choose the player of the black or white pieces, the year, the ECO or the result. There's no option to search on a position for instance, unless it's hidden elsewhere. You have to select the options from a series of dropdown boxes too. It's not all laid out neatly on a single search box. The GUI is a bit underwhelming as well.

HIARCS - As mentioned above, this looks like a commercial development of the open source ChessX. To be fair, it does seem to have been developed into a pretty comprehensive playing, analyzing and database management tool. This could be close to the ideal solution, but here are my qualms.

There is no demo, and although there are a good number of video tutorials available on YouTube, they are over 10 years old.

There are several versions of HIARCS:

Standard - Only supports databases up to 2m games.

Pro - This comes in 3 flavours, single core, multi-core and premium.

Most users would probably skip the premium version, but if you need the multi-core version for faster analysis, the prices quoted do not include tax, so it will set you back over £100 (or dollars or euros - they're all pretty much the same now that sterling has gone down the toilet).

The other thing that can make this even more painful financially for some punters is that if you have a PC and a Mac, you have to buy it twice. Given that most companies allow their software to be run on 2 or 3 machines, it would be nice if they could be different platforms.

Chessbase - Now we come to the big daddy of them all. This is the one that the pros use, and the well-heeled amateurs. I don't need to go into what it can and can't do. There's more information about this online than any other chess software, and by a long way. Here are the negative points that I have discovered:

• They don't even make a Mac version, and by all accounts, you can't get the PC version to run via an emulator on a Mac.
• Filtering games is slower than the free SCID database.
• There's no free trial, and even the basic app (without any database) is obscenely expensive. I think the latest version (17) is nearly £200.
• You need a pretty fast processor for it to function properly.

CONCLUSION

I said it right at the start, there is no ideal solution, but I'd love to hear from anyone who can prove otherwise.

For the pros, Chessbase is a no-brainer. They won't baulk at shelling out for it, and they'll likely have hi spec machines that will run it efficiently.

As for the rest of us, some will bite the bullet and buy Chessbase as well, safe in the knowledge that there's nothing else to match it.

Other than that, HIARCS might be the next best thing, but I'm not prepared to commit the cash without knowing whether it would suit my needs. Chess Assistant could also be worth looking into, but I couldn't even find any tutorials or demos for it. The same caveat applies regarding purchasing it blind.

The best free option, by a country mile, is SCID (SCID vs PC). If you can live with the fact that you have to use its own format if you want to edit and annotate games, then it's likely to fit the bill. If you need games in pgn format, you can of course export them after editing. You can even export a whole database in pgn format.

This has been a bit of a long-winded review, but I hope it stimulates a discussion, and I'd love to be proven wrong in my assessments of these programmes.

You can add ChessFlare.com to your list It's a platform for managing opening repertoires, organizing them, and visualizing them as a node tree.