Detailed description of Chess Assistant 8.1
Index
An important aspect when working with a lot of information is not only to be able to
find what you want as fast as possible, as through searches or other tools, but to be also
able to organize your work. For this purpose you've got two basic systems: a series of
classes, which are categories (i.e. Historic game, Kingside attack, prophylaxis, etc.) in
which you can classify games for easy referral, and a powerful and flexible new system
known as Classifiers.
Chess Assistant 8.1 comes with 31 standard classes that can be edited by name and/or
color at any moment. They can be found in the List window, or by means of a search.
Furthermore, you can easily gather games of a certain class and separate them into a
dataset or create a new base of them. Special attention was paid to creating easy-to-use
shortcuts so that to make working with classes as simple as possible.
Next come Classifiers. Basically, Classifiers is a tree-like organizational system,
similar to Windows Explorer, in which you create folders with links to certain games in a
base. The following example will help make that clearer.
Suppose you've got a base with every Sicilian game you could find, so that you could
prepare a long detailed teaching program. You have etched the following outline:
- Theory (including the entire body of theory for the
Sicilian Dragon, Najdorf, Sveshnikov, etc.)
- Thematic pawn structures (such as the Dragon structure
and the Sveshnikov structure to name a few)
- Thematic positional methods (such as the exchange
sacrifice on c3 followed by a knight taking on e4)
- And of course model games that you plan looking at more
than once
NB: This modest study program should only take you about 20 years
If you are limited to keeping all this in a list, it would be almost impossible to find
your way around, and you would be forced to create a number of smaller bases, no doubt one
for each and every one of the items above. This would also mean repeating a number of
games since one of your model games for example could also be useful for the thematic pawn
structures, and not to mention for the theory itself. Normally, you’d have several
copies with one for each of those bases, but with the Chess Assistant 8.1 classifiers and
folders this is completely unnecessary.
What you have to do is open a classifier for the base, and call it “Sicilian or
bust!” for example. You can attach a text description (with complete layout and font
control), a board position, an image, a video, you name it. Then enter the name of the
main folders such as Theory, Typical pawn structures, etc. as in the screenshot below.
You’ll notice that each folder has a number of games attached to it. These are merely
links to the games in the base, so that you can instantly access the games linked to that
folder. You can also attach a specific Search function to each folder so that it could
scan the base for specific games, and if you receive new games (ex: from the CA
subscription service) you can make it scan them to see if any of them fit the criteria of
your folder. As you can see, this also makes Classifiers an ideal tool for building and
maintaining a repertoire.
However, Classifiers can also be used as a tool to create electronic chess publications
(magazines or books), so that each Folder would in fact be a chapter or a page. Note that
each mode has an unlimited text space, which can accept all types of multimedia items, as
well as hyperlinks.
Classifiers can
now Contain Multiple Search Criteria
Classifier context menu: Add to current criteria
You can now add additional search criteria to classifiers. This allows more flexible
classifier specification.
Other Minor Database Enhancements
One of the usability enhancements we have made in Chess Assistant 8.1 is the
incorporation of tooltips that show which classes and folders a particular game belongs
to. Just hold your mouse over the "classes box" that appears before each game in
a dataset.
Index
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