A Technical Guideline for Chessbase 18 (Part 1)

CHESSBASE 18 NEW FEATURES 

1. STYLE REPORT

Style report analyzes the strategical profile of a player. It helps us in the preparation against our next opponent to see his/her weaknesses, playing style and aptitude. Style report also gives us the most interesting insights about our own strength and weakness. It analyzes more than 30 different strategic themes, gives feedback on how we score in those themes and how often those emerges in our games in relation to standard grandmasters. 

HOW TO USE THIS FEATURE:

It opens the big reference database: MEGA25; 

An interesting example: 

"THE MAGICIAN OF RIGA"

The 8th World champion Mikhail Tal was known for his mindboggling madness on  board. Throughout his long career he changed his styles. Before the world championship against Botvinnik, he was a very dynamic player, a fierce attacker! Who sacrificed pieces and risking everything. Later his style became more calm, controlled and positional, a bit more risk averse.

Let's see whether the style report shows it. We start selecting Mikhail Tal and clicking on style report in the player index.

And we chose more long games of tal (his blitz ones are just entertaining):

Then we select the time range (1952-1962;young tal), and we can see the style report pretty first. 

And also well get to see some observations derived from the analysis:

There is a datalist based on his opening reportoire's different variations and winning percentage with them.

We can check the theme games upon his opening variations and motifs and later on, check the whole game:

Then, the same way we'll choose  a different time range of Tal's career and compare the stats:

We can see how his playing motif significantly changes with much more less risk averse than before!

So this way, we can how helpful this feature is.

2.HOW TO DOWNLOAD GAMES FROM LICHESS AND CHESS.COM

There is a new function to download games from Lichess and chess.com named Load online player which helps us to analyse online games with advanced features of chessbase in great depth.

After clicking it you'll get an entry form where you can put up username of the player whose game you're looking for, the website and the categories (blitz, rapid e.t.c) with date.

After you put your preferences and click "ok" it starts the download and very soon you'll get a list of that player's games sorted by white games at first and then black ones.

                     If you select all the games and then right click, you'll create a style report.

**THIS SAME METHOD IS APPLICABLE FOR CHESS.COM

3.OPPONENT PREPARATION WITH LICHESS GAMES

Chessbase offers a feature which let us prepare against a player whose lichess username is yet unknown to us. 

If you know the club and that player's username, go to the option prepare against.

Then we select the player and click the function Find lichess account 

Then we write down the team he/she  plays with, and this way we get to know that player's username.

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