Mac users who would like to play or learn more about chess have an excellent tool available in ChessMaster 9000.

Taking advantage of the strengths associated with the Mac OS X environment, the program provides attractive and powerful features for advanced players as well as those learning chess for the first time.

CM 9000 requires Mac OS 10.2 or higher and works well with 10.4, Apple's new Tiger OS. A product of Feral Interactive, the program sells for approximately $40 US. A free upgrade that corrects several minor bugs in the initial release can be downloaded from the Feral Interactive site.

Overall, an impressive chess program that is highly recommended. The details follow ...

• Interactive tutorial modules and quizzes, well organized by skill area and degree of difficulty, are an impressive part of ChessMaster 9000.
• While playing full games, users can choose to receive assistance such as suggested moves, positional analyses, labelling of openings, and blunder alerts.
• Openings can be studied in several ways, including through the Opening Book Reference and the Opening Book Editor.
• In the Classic Games module, users can study hundreds of instructional games by past and current masters. The complete game database has over 500,000 games.
• An interesting, printable, cross-referenced 265 page glossary of chess terms is included.
• Several top chess instructors had direct input into this version of ChessMaster, including Josh Waitzkin, Bruce Pandolfini, Larry Evans, and Yasser Seirawan.

• Users have extensive control over game conditions and parameters.
• Options for opponents include a large collection of pre-programmed personalities based on actual players, against the computer according to a customized or general description (e.g., Strong Opponent, Grandmaster), or against other players who are also using ChessMaster 9000 on their Macs.
• Games can be played under rated or non-rated conditions, and a tournament structure for playing is available.

• Requirements include Mac OS 10.2 or higher, 1.3GB of hard drive, and a DVD drive.
• Files are readable by Spotlight, the Google-type search engine included with Apple's current operating system. For example, Spotlight indicates that references to "Anderssen" are included in two tutorials.
• The program recognizes, communicates with, and can regulate iTunes and iChat if these are running in the background.
• Speech output is available for many part of the program. The voice is clear and natural-sounding, and is helpful for hearing the pronounciation of uncommon chess terms.
• Two finger scrolling is supported for easily changing the size and position of the chess board on the screen.
• Feral Interactive includes excellent documentation, both in a printed manual and through a searchable file.

• There's an amusing scene in Searching for Bobby Fischer when Josh Waitzkin's dad tries to fake an answer about Josh's chess rating. The rating assigned to me by ChessMaster was even more preposterous.
• Upon startup, a Puzzle of the Day appears on the login screen. Of the several puzzles that I saw, a surprising number had errors in their layout, required illogical solutions, or both.
• The Blunder Alert! feature worked well on nearly all of the situations I devised to test it. A strange result came about when I challenged the feature using one of Kasparov's amazing moves in his classic 1999 game against Topalov.
• The move indicator lights on the board were incorrect when an instructional game was chosen that placed Black at the bottom of the screen. (The pieces were switched correctly but not the indicator lights.)
• Speech output often would cut out before the last few words of a message were spoken.
• It seemed unlikely that the Chess Live feature would be useful anytime soon, simply because of a lack of critical mass. Apple's GameRanger did not locate anyone hosting a ChessMaster game on the Internet during the times I checked. This problem has been noted previously by other reviewers.

• While working on this review, I was running several other applications along with ChessMaster (e.g., code editor, browser, graphics program, screen capture utility). Every once in awhile, ChessMaster would quit unexpectedly. None of the other programs were affected, and I wouldn't expect this to be a problem in a routine environment.
• I tried to create a diagram for automatic analysis by opening a file of a position saved using ChessMaster. ChessMaster crashed in this situation, giving an error message that suggested the engine could not determine if castling was legal. Ah, if only it had just asked!
• When checking the Progress Report option in the Kids' Room, I reached a dead end -- all menus disabled and no visible options for going forward or backward. Fortunately, Apple's Force Quit option was available so that shutting down wasn't necessary.