Rybka 4

For years Rybka has been the uncontested number one in computer chess and since its great breakthrough in 2006 the program has won with remarkable regularity one world title after the other. So that this state of affairs will continue in the future, the Rybka-team gathered around programmer Vasik Rajlich has developed a new version which is even better: “Rybka 4 plays more aggressively and more tactically“. Availabe from 28. May

During the last two years the engine has been improved in almost all areas. One major theme has been the understanding of the attack on the king. The new Rybka 4 is in this case more precise and reliable than its predecessor. At the same time the search function now operates more quickly and efficiently and the evaluation function delivers even more spot-on judgments. As for the playing style, Rybka 4 logically continues the development of the past few years. Thanks to further development in the tactical area too, the new Rybka 4 will be indispensable for all those who work and analyse with chess engines. Rybka 4 is delivered with the new user-friendly Fritz 12 interface and contains a database of 1.5 million games and includes CLASSIC membership for playchess. com for one year.

Fritz 12

Fritz is the world’s most popular chess program, developed by ChessBase, “the world's leading chess software company” (Washington Post). Whether you are a beginner, club player or professional – Fritz has everything that chess players could want: automatically adjusting playing strength, handicap and coaching functions, explanation of positions, coloured danger warnings, openings statistics, automatic game analysis, trainings modules for openings, tactics, endgames, and a database of one million games. Fritz continues to fascinate the chess world. It has beaten a reigning World Champion in the battle of man vs machine, and it has worked with World Champions as a clever training partner (Garry Kasparov: “I regularly analyse with Fritz”) which will entertain you with fresh and humorous verbal comments.

NEW: FRITZ is now even faster. The completely redesigned ergonomic interface gives you instant access to all the most important functions. This means more comfort and clearer controls. Never before has it been so easy and fast to play with Fritz.

FRITZ prepares you for serious encounters over the chessboard. Have you ever trained with a human grandmaster? Fritz provides you with twelve hours of video lessons for every level of play. Enjoy the instructive analysis of master games, the discussion of clever openings traps, deadly combinations to solve. The video material introduces you to world class grandmasters like Alexei Shirov, Rustam Kasimdzhanov, Vladimir Kramnik, Vishy Anand, even chess legend Garry Kasparov. And if you cannot play chess Fritz will teach you the rules of the games – within an hour you will be playing your first game of chess.

FRITZ helps you to find friends. It includes a full year’s subscription to Playchess.com, the world’s biggest chess server. Every day you have thousands of players logged into this virtual chess club. You will always find an opponent that matches your playing strength. Or you can simply watch top tournaments and the games of world-class grandmasters played live on the server.

Shredder 12

Shredder 12 by Stefan Meyer Kahlen. No other chess program has won so many world championship titles. The new edition of Deep Shredder is stronger than all previous versions. Meyer Kahlen: "The improvements are visible all over the place. Especially the search and the evaluation have become much more precise. The engine is 100 Elo points stronger than the predecessor Shredder 11."

Hiarcs 12

For nearly 20 years HIARCS has been among the very best chess programs in the world. Ever since its first World Championship success in 1991 HIARCS has maintained its position as one of the world's premier chess playing programs. As recently as December 2007 HIARCS further enhanced its reputation by winning the International Paderborn Computer Chess Championship in Germany ahead of a world class field.
HIARCS is famous for its human-like playing style and its ability to come up with the unexpected. Recent HIARCS versions are renowned for sharp attacking chess and a never say die attitude to their play. In HIARCS 12 this playing style has been positively enhanced through a new deeper search and evaluation of dynamic possibilities. It is capable of building deep attacking positions against the enemy king and executing exciting mating attacks. This new approach enables HIARCS to play interesting, distinctive aggressive chess while being sensitive to the needs of the position.
This has improved HIARCS in all phases of the game and even in quieter positions HIARCS 12 is able to be more selective about the variations it explores to achieve a better understanding than previous versions leading to much stronger play.
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Junior 10

Junior 10 is the new 2006 Computer Chess World Champion. The program, written by the Israeli programmers Amir Ban and Shy Bushinsky, narrowly defeated its main rival, the many times world champion program Shredder, at the Computer Chess World Championship which was held during the Chess Olympiad in Turin, Italy. Junior impressed experts with its extraordinary dynamic play, and remained undefeated in this event. Junior 10 has its own special search techniques and evaluation functions, which makes it different to any other chess program. In the latest version we see the rigorous continuation of a development that a3ted with Junior 7 and has led to a unique and creative playing style. It a3ted with the famous bishop sacrifice on h2 in a match against Garry Kasparov and now has been honed to perfection in Version 10. In spite of their success in computer chess tournaments the programmers of Junior are not primarily concerned with beating other chess programs. Instead they have developed Junior into an instrument that enables human beings to gain new insights and understanding in the game of chess. A good example is the very pronounced understanding of compensation, which allows its users to explore new possibilities of sacrifice attacks and sharp dynamic play.
Junior 10 offers you 12 months of free access to the Playchess.com server. You also get the latest enhanced and improved Junior openings book.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Pentium III, 128 MB RAM, Win98 SE, Win2000, WinXP, DVD-drive, Soundcard.

Chess Tiger 15

Chess Tiger by Christoph Théron is the shooting star amongst chess programs. The rate at which its playing strength has increased in recent years is sensational. Already in 1999 and 2000 it chalked up a number of remarkable tournament victories. Then it became the serial winner of the Dutch computer chess championships, taking its last title there in December 2002. In 2001 Chess Tiger won the "Republica Argentina" grandmaster tournament in Buenos Aires, ahead of a number of top GMs, with an incredible 2788 rating performance. In the SSDF computer rating lists Chess Tiger is always in one of the top places. So it is hardly surprising that computer chess fans hold this program in the very highest esteem. Most of them consider Chess Tiger one of the top chess programs in the world. Chess Tiger 15.0 runs under the original Fritz interface. There are plenty of functions for beginners, club players and grandmasters: blitz and tournament chess, handicap levels, analysis. There is a competent chess coach for beginners, with complete move descriptions, warnings and real-time help during the game. In a special sparring level the program deliberately sets up tactical chances for you to exploit. It has many high-quality print functions, a beautiful 2D board and a state-of-the-art photo-realistic 3D board in elegant "glass" design. The program comes with a giant tournament-tested openings book and a database of 500,000 top games. It also includes free one-year access to the chess server Playchess.

Zap!Chess

Zap!Chess is the commercial version of Zappa, the 2005 World Computer Chess Champion. The CD contains two versions: "Paderborn" and "Reykjavik". Reyjavik is the version that won the World Championship; Paderborn includes some ideas from my work at Illinois. I myself do not know which one is better; you'll have to find that out for yourself.
The style of the program reflects my background as a computer engineer. Rather than developing clever search tricks that may or may not work, I concentrated on getting the most out of modern hardware. Zap!Chess contains one of the best parallel implementations in the world to run efficiently on multiple CPU systems, and it also uses 64-bit machines to their full potential. The program contains large amounts of chess knowledge, and like most modern programs it is tuned fairly aggressively - it knows where the opponent's king lives. This gives it an exciting style without being unsound. While the program is optimized for long time controls and big hardware, don't despair if you own a smaller system. Both versions come with an implementation of Singular Extensions, the famous Deep Blue search algorithm. They are disabled by default, but they increase the tactical strength of the program at the cost of positional strength.