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great software but dont buy this version if you run ME

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: April 23, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The manufacturers have stated that the software is for win 95 or 98. MArk their word if you are running Win ME. I find the game play great with a good variety of opponents to chose from however the tutorial's do not work properly; keeps crashing on my Win-ME OS. I upgraded recently to XP and still I cannot get these sections to function properly. Despite this setback I have improved my game from a rating of around 1300 to 1550. What I'm especially fond of is the feature where the chessmaster assigns a certain score to a move you make, so i like going over my moves (from real life matches that i record) one by one with the chessmaster and figure out where I made mistakes thanks to this scoring feature. You learn a lot if you have an average chess rating like mine. Looking forward to chesmaster 9000 which will support XP.

One last point: The sections "john nuns puzzles" and "match the masters" are also great to better your game, the annotations given were very helpful.

ChessMaster Review

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 27 / 44
Date: October 30, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I am a gifted chess player and do not remember a time in my life when I did not play chess. Imagine my disappointment when I first went to kindergarten and discovered that I was the only one who played chess much less even knew the game. ChessMaster, with its tutoring capabilities, is the program for the beginning player and, with its library of games, a must for the chess affecianando. With a variety of levels of play to select, as well as playing types, only the very, very best chess player will be unable to find a competitive, but not dominate, opponent.

While the graphics might appeal to others, I am a dinosaur and the standard board is fine. However, those options are available and are quite good. In general, the program has everything most people would want and is an important program to have in one's library. The only drawback to the program is the one common to all chess programs. Chess by machine lacks the spark of human intuition and reflects the brute force approach to the game which obtains from mathematical equations.

For the male mind in particular, chess is a 'must learn' game. It uses all areas of reasoning and teaches reading and language skills (surprise!) as well as the more commonly recognized spacial logic. Chess players at very high levels are also accomplished artists. They write, play music, paint, speak multiple languages, and, in the last century, one strong but unsuccessful candidate for the world title was a professional ballet dancer. Personally, I have worked in highly technical fields in aerospace, exactly where the common perception puts chess players, but I have also been an interpretor and am now writing books for a living.

ChessMaster teaches chess and chess teaches much more. As the best general chess program available, consider ChessMaster.

Absolutly the worst program I have ever used!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 27
Date: July 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is with out a doubt the worst program of any kind I have ever bought! I mean it is real bad! It crashes so much I can't use it. There are so many things wrong with it I would have to write a book to list them all. Not only can I not finish a game of chess, but I can’t use the other features, such as Josh's game reviews. It is really a shame because the program has great potential. I have Chessmaster 6000 and it crashes quite a bit also, but Chessmaster 8000 is ridiculous! [...] I give credit where credit is dew, but this program is the worst, period. I contacted “The Learning Company”, the folks that brought us this program, and they offered nothing but a bad attitude! I wont be buying any more of there products you can bet on that. If you are looking for a good chess program look to “FRITZ 6” for carefree gaming fun. Hope this review helped. Sincerely, Chris

Outdated already. Incompatible with newer Windows versions.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 25
Date: November 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

ChessMaster was once the best chess software on the market for most players, but now UBI seems to have abandoned the program. The newer version contains more fluff than earlier versions, but actually fewer options as to setting up custom boards, etc..

MOST importantly, this is not compatible with any of the newwer versions of Windows, and will shut down at a moment's notice, with no provocation, making it totally worthless. Even Windows' compatibility wizard cannot help this completely flawed program work.

It is a shame that UBI has obviously chosen to abandon ChessMaster and let some other software producer (as of yet, not shown themselves) take the lead in thie genre. They used to make a great product, but have chosen not to keep up.

UBI stated in their technical help that they have no intention of making a version compatible with the newer Windows versions, and MS has no intention of continuing to produce the older versions of Windows.

The question that keeps coming to mind is; Why bother to make this program at all since it was obsolete before it was released?

Great Product Even Using Windows XP

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: September 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Without knowing the requirements I purchased Chessmaster 8000 and loaded into my Sony Vaio notebook using Windows XP. Chessmaster works fine with that operating system. Yet I am uncertain if updates and downloads from the Ubi Soft website will work.

All in all I really enjoy playing Chessmaster 8000 in Windows XP. A truly great product.

Not bad.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: March 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Too much graphics slows up the system. I have 256RAM and 600 Pentium 3 processor, yet the CM8000 still runs a bit slow and takes up too many resources. Some of the graphics are also a bit buggy in the system (some of the boards that you can choose).

The chess engine is pretty strong and at its highest level will beat the crap out of just about anybody. One thing I don't like, is that the players that you can choose from are unevenly ranked. For examply, I have little trouble beating some of the personalities that are rated around 2100, yet I am losing to others which are rated considerably lower (1600 Elo). So, don't know, they should've worked more on that.

Overall, the program isn't bad, though. You might want to consider Fritz or some of the other programs out there on the market. They usually don't emphasize graphics as much, yet they play very strong as well.

Good Start

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: August 30, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I initially wrote this review a year ago and right after I bouthgt the program. A year after and having bought Fritz 7, I would like to update it.

I am am intermediate chess player and I found the Chessmaster to be very educational, well designed and rich in tools and characters to play against. In my experience, it is a really good program and may be the best for children and/or beginner players. The reasons are easy to use interface, very rich content of basic educational lessons with some courses developed by Bruce Pondolfini and Josh Waitzkin. In addition, the program has a special kid's room with features specifically targeted at kids to to which my son responds well. Exploring the lessons alone will take you a month and provide great value.

The other great feature of the program is the over 85 human-like characters you can play against - from really weak opponents to really tough guys. This saves you from the boredom of playing a really good computer (depressing) or repetitive games against a weak computer.

The people who may find Chessmaster less satisfying are probably the stronger players. At one point in your development as a player you would like to analyse your games seriously and Chessmaster is kind of weak there. I have two major problems with the analysis:

1. Weaker analysis (may vary depending on how much time you gove the computer - i use the default 10 secs per move). The analysis is not always correct - it does not always find the best move (try comparing it to a Grand Master annotated game for example). Without being an expert I also think it has a tendency to ignore the position resulting from the last move in the suggested "best" line (sometimes I think I see some real disasters there). It also has a tendency to go for massive exchanges of meterial in the suggested line, probably in an attempt to resolve the numeric value of the position.

2. The strenght of the analysis may not have been much of an issue if the game allowed you a way to explore/evaluate your candidate moves. Other possible candidate moves are never considered in the analysis. Unfortunately, there is also no way to set up a position and switch beteween human player and computer player. To turn the computer player on and off you need to start a new game and loose the position.

Overall, this is a great program and I really enjoyed it. A year later I switched to another program BUT I am not sure if I would have appreciated the new program withouth the training I got from Chessmaster.

Great Program! Never crashed in Win98SE...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: October 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have been using this program in a daily basis for the past year. I usually play more than ten matches a day. It works smoothly and the only thing that can be considered bad is that when Auto is selected in a Tournament (so that the computer players will play against each other without you having to choose each game individually), the faces of the players only appear on the third or fourth move. Since I have a 64Mb Pentium 200, I don't think this is so bad.

On the other hand, this program helped me increase my rating from 1700 to almost 2100! The online lessons are awesome. The database is huge. And the Chessmaster is still a tough match (2700... 2900... who cares ?! I'll be beaten shamelessly anyway!)

Chessmaster 8000 has at least 2 bugs...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: January 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

a) The program is biased against white side:
It gives white a more PLUS score in a SYMMETRICAL position. Indirectly it FORCES white to play for the WIN at some extra COST.

After 1 e4 e5, it took 1.29 min and searched to a depth of 5 moves (10 plies), evaluated for 2 millions positions, then it selected the move 2 Nf3 with the score of .21. (Where 1.00 point is equivalent to 1 pawn.)

After 1 e3 e5 2 e4, it took 1.45 min and searched to a depth of 5 moves (10 plies), evaluated for 2.3 millions positions, then it selected the move 2 ... Nf6 with the score of .21.

After 1 d4 d5, it took 3.35 min and searched to a depth of 5 moves (10 plies), evaluated for 3.7 millions positions, then it selected the move 2 Bf4 with the score of .20.

After 1 d3 d5 2 d4, it took 2.55 min and searched to a depth of 5 moves (10 plies), evaluated for 3.4 millions positions, then it selected the move 2 ... Bf5 with the score of .20.

B) Search-depth extension has some bug:
Which causes the program fail to give correct or good positional evaluation.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- BK
-- -- -- -- -- BP BP --
-- -- BB -- BP -- -- BP
-- -- -- -- WP -- -- --
-- -- -- WP WP -- -- --
-- BR -- -- -- WK WP WP
-- -- WB BQ -- -- -- --
-- WQ -- -- -- -- -- --

In the above position, black just captured white rook at b3. It is white's turn to move.

After 1.31 minutes, search to a depth of 10 plies, and evaluated for 3 millions positions, it selected the move (white) Qxb3 with the score 0.98.

After 5.18 minutes, search to a depth of 11 plies, and evaluated for 11 millions positions, it selected the move (white) Qxb3 with the score -1.01.

First, the evaluation at 1 ply DIFFERENCE (from 10 to 11) caused a point-swing of 2 pawns! I EXPECTED a reasonable point-swing of 1/3 to 1/2 of a pawn. 1 point (or pawn) swing is too much, and 2 point swing is unreasonable. The search EXTENSION was supposed to extend when there is a LARGE point swing in an unclear position.

Second, at the standard rate of 3 minutes per move, the program could not detect this miscalculation. The positional evaluation is incorrect.

For this brief moment, white is up a pawn, but his king is exposed, while black king is secured. The harmony between black pieces wins the game, however is undetectable at a shallow search.

I have chessmaster 2000, 2100, 3000, 5000 and 8000. Their human interface are nice, more friendly than Fritz. But the two above BUGS cost chessmater 8000 one star.

Re: Correction

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: January 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Regarding compatibility problems, I advise caution: you may find you get to some point in the game or other features and then the problems crop up. UBI Soft is, frankly, stupid for not immediately and fully supporting Windows 2000 and XP, for this title as well as older versions of Chessmaster (and Riven, etc.) so that customers who upgrade OSes don't lose hundreds of dollars of good software. For my part, I'm considering picking up an old 98/ME machine because (a) we could use a 2nd PC and (b) I want to play Myst 3!

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