Chess Program Review Archive

You can think of the Openings 2000 program as an electronic version of opening references like ECO and MCO. However, Openings 2000 is superior to these offerings because it lets you access data much faster than you could with a paper book. You also get a few other things, like success/failure and occurrence statistics of each opening move, IM/GM evaluations, and computer evaluation in the form of CAP data to quickly point out blunders.

When the first version of Chess Assistant Openings was released, there were a number of products on the market that fulfilled the same function. Some of them had better opening coverage, but were not as timely (for instance, the Tasc FideChess Encyclopedia). However, with this new version, Convekta has closed the gap by expanding theoretical coverage, increasing the number of games that come with the product, and making a number of significant usage enhancements. The timeliness of the data is also good, with about 20,000 games included from 1999.

Previous owners of the Openings program may be interested in the statistics in the table below:

You can see from the above data that the new version is a significant upgrade. I would suggest that you also read my review of the previous version of Openings, which discusses some of the basic capabilities of the program (all of which are present in this latest version).

Because a "reduced" version of Chess Assistant is used to access the data on this CDROM, this new version of Openings inherits a number of new features from Chess Assistant 5 (the previous version of Openings employed Chess Assistant 4). Most features from CA 5 are present in this program, including the "show best lines" option, which allows you to see the main lines from a given position without having to explore the chess tree. CAP data are also included. I would recommend that you read my review of Chess Assistant 5 for more information. Pay special attention to the last paragraph of the tree section, since it has special importance for opening study.

One thing that you won't find from CA 5 is the Tiger Chess engine, but Crafty is included.

One feature of CA 5 that is present in this program bears special mention. It is the ability to hyperlink from one theory "article"/game to another. Thus you see transpositions as underlined hyperlinks in a game score. When you click on these links, you are transported to another theoretical article instantaneously. Once you are done looking at the article, you hit a small red "back" arrow, and you are taken back to where you were previously. This is very nifty. Furthermore, when you are at the end of a variation, you can see every game in which the variation occurred automatically (without having to search for them by hand).

You should note that you cannot create new games or databases (only edit and save the existing ones) with this program. However, if you have Chess Assistant 5, you can access the opening data with that program, where the full functionality of a chess database is available. One weakness of the previous version was it’s inability to export any kind of data to another program. Openings 2000 is still limited in this respect, but with one important exception. It is now possible for you to export any game or set of variations via the windows clipboard. You can then use any program that can read PGN data to work on, or store the data.

Even though the theoretical coverage has been vastly improved in this version, I cannot guarantee that you will find your pet opening line; there is just too much material for me to check. That being said, I think that Openings 2000 now makes a good general purpose reference. The coverage seems to be very good for popular openings like the French, Caro-Kann, Sicilian, Ruy Lopez, etc. There is even a section dealing with various offbeat openings.

One question that always comes up when products like this are concerned is whether the game collection that is included with program contains games that are referenced in the theory database. In Openings 2000, games are not referenced directly as they are in an Informant. Instead, you are presented with a list of games from a particular variation (instead of just one). I would guess that there are reference games for at least 90% of the theoretical variations. And while it was not possible for me to check every variation in the theory database, I did some spot-checking and found reference games for every variation I examined. Thus the 90% estimate is probably very conservative.

Owners of CA5 should note that they already have the theoretical database included with Openings 2000. The only difference is that the games database included with Openings 2000 is different from that included with CA 5. I am not sure at this point whether the database is a subset of the one included with CA 5 or not.

Overall, this program is pretty darn inexpensive for what you get. While I have said in the past that paper books are superior for discussing things like opening plans, such is not the case with opening theory. Here, the computer really comes to it’s own by making the information much more accessible. Personally speaking, I very rarely find the need to access my MCO any more. Software like this provides much better (and timely) detailed theoretical coverage. If you are a person that likes ECO, then you will not find the coverage in Openings 2000 to be as thorough. However, it is much, much cheaper.

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