Monday, December 11, 2006

Rybka

A club member asked me recently whether he should buy Fritz 10 to upgrade from Fritz 8. I suggested that he would get more bang for the buck by purchasing instead another engine: either Shredder or Rybka (both of which will work in your familiar ChessBase interface). You can get Rybka either from the Rybkachess website or from Convekta (likely elsewhere as well); it is widely recommended as the best chess engine.

Peter Doggers recently posted a commentary on just how superior Rybka is (it's rated at least 100 points higher than its nearest competitor). He includes a brilliant Shredder-Rybka game to illustrate its ability to see material sacrifices. You can see a great illustration of its endgame technique in the game Rybka-Christiansen at Goran's website. And more of Rybka's games can be seen at Chessgames.com.

I think I know another present I want from Santa....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

For those on a budget or who'd rather spend $ on other things, free engines like TogaII are competitive with Fritz also.

Anonymous said...

Apparently the free-to-download early version of Rybka (1.0 I think) usually beats Fritz 9 anyhow . . .

Anonymous said...

Hmm, this engine is getting more and more known recently. Might be prudent to investigate this. :)