Detailed description of Chess Assistant 8.1
Index
Yet another new mode in Chess Assistant 8.1 is Players encyclopedia. The Players
encyclopedia contains 800 photographs of rated players together with information about
their performance organized by year and tournament. This mode starts when you open Guru
database (or, if you have installed the Guru database during the Chess Assistant
installation, then it opens automatically with each start of the program).
The Guru database is represented in the Object browser bar with its list icon and its
classifier. When you click the classifier icon there, the classifier opens. Its folders
are organized in alphabetical order and they contain a list of players. Each subfolder
represents a single player:
Clicking the subfolder with player’s name displays the player’s image in the middle
part of the screen. You can find the player’s data displayed below the snapshot –
player’s nationality, title, dates of birth and death. There also is a text box with the
Search button below it – you may use it to find a player by his name. Enter the name and
click the Search button.
You will quickly find out that working in this mode is not just having fun when
watching some new faces of the rated players. Let us explore the structure of the
classifier folders deeper.
As you may see in the picture above, the two folders of the upper level represent the
initial letters of player’s name. They just help you to navigate inside the classifier.
The folder with a full player’s name and country of birth contains two sub-folders, Elo
and Years and tournaments.
Clicking the Elo folder displays the following diagram in the middle part of window:
Here you can find data of the selected player’s performance organized by year and
displayed in form of the bar diagram according the player’s Elo rating.
Moreover, another folder of the lowest level in this classifier, Years and tournaments,
contains list of tournaments, in which the player participated. The list contains complete
information on a tournament, including year, place, an official title of the event and
number of the player’s games there. Now the middle part of the window contains a toolbar
over the list of tournaments.
The toolbar has two spinner boxes, From and To, which allow you to set the time
interval. There are two buttons, the upper one (Show list of tournaments) and the lower
one (Open list). Open list button is de-activated by default; to activate it you must
first select a tournament from the list by clicking it. After clicking this button Chess
Assistant will perform a Header search operation and display its result as a list of games
in the window below. Click the Show list button to switch to the list of tournaments
again.
You may find it useful to select some prominent player and watch out, how he/she
interpreted a favorite opening in various competitions year after year. Generally, Players
Encyclopedia mode can provide a reasonable alternative way to standard means of preparing
for an opponent.
Index
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