ChessOK is now offering a number of upgrade and purchase options for the new Rybka 3.0 and Chess Assistant 10.0. You can find more info on these offers here. You may also want to check out some of the Rybka information (tutorials, interviews and the like) here.  ...more

As some of you may be aware, Convekta/ChessOK and Vasik Rajlich are hard at work on a new chess playing program, code named Rybka Aquarium. This new program will have some familiar elements for users of Chess Assistant (like the tree and database). Aquarium features a slick GUI (coupled to the super-strong Rybka engine), and will provide many ease-of-use features. Dadi Jonsson has interviewed both Victor Zakharov and Pete Lupherenko about their new GUI - you can read it here.  ...more

Thanks to the wide variety of software and books available, it has never been easier to improve your chess. In this article, I discuss the components of tactical skill, and provide some guidelines for improving in this area. Along the way I also take a look at some popular myths and misconceptions about tactical ability, and how it is improved.

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Maxim Blokh shows us some of the techniques that he uses within Chess Assistant to create the problems in his books, and the program CT-ART. As some of you may be aware, many of the positions have a different solution, depending on who's side it is to move. Training positions like this buid tactical vision, since it requires the student to pay special attention to any resources the opponent might have. Maxim refers to these types of exercises as "dual task", for obvious reasons.  ...more

Today, I've got a very quick article on automatically filling in field names. This technique is commonly used when you are quickly entering a number of games, and want to assign a single tournament name to them. Or let's say you're copy an number of games that you played on an internet server, and want to make sure that the server name is properly recorded.  ...more

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