I have to admit, this is one offering that I've been eagerly awaiting since it was announced by Convekta many months ago. Mikhail Tal was one of my favorite players. People that have been visiting my web site for a while know that I used to have a picture of Tal in the left hand frame of this page.
This CD contains about 2600 of Tal's games, with nearly every game annotated (I counted less than 5 without annotations). The annotations themselves are languageless, in the form of Informant-style codes, and are extremely deep and detailed. The annotations were done by a team of Grand Masters (Khalifman, Kochiev, Makarichev and Yudasin) and International Masters from Petersburg, and are not computer generated.
In addition to the annotated games, there is also a selection of about 250 quiz positions. For accessing the quizzes, you use an interface that is very much similar to that used in the other Chess Assistant tutorial packages. I would suggest you look at my review of Chess Tactics for Beginners to get an idea of what features are present. The quiz positions are organized into the following categories: attack on the King (uncastled, castled on same and opposite sides), intuitive sacrifices, tactical blows, strategic methods, and endgame technique. The exercises are not "easy", and will require a bit of thought. You can also play out positions against the built-in chess engine (Dragon or Crafty). You can export any position to a variety of external chess playing programs (Hiarcs, Genius, MChess, Rebel, etc.).
You have your choice of interfaces for accessing the games. There is a nice chronological browser that shows pictures of Tal at various times in his life. Once you select a particular year, you are presented with a list of tournaments that he played in that year. You can then select particular games from the tournament that you are interested in. The CD uses a version of Chess Assistant lite to browse and examine the games. Thus, you can use Chess Assistant's search capabilities to find any game you are interested in (i.e. if you are using it in conjunction with a book, for instance). This means you can search by player, year, result, opening, position, etc.) If there happens to be a variation that you want to examine that was not explored in the game, you can use any of the previously mentioned chess engines for analysis.
There are a full range of printing capabilities, and you can add diagrams, etc to any printouts that you make. This is handy for when you are analyzing over a real board. There is also the ability to make html printouts for web pages.
The bottom line: Tal fans will want this CD. Even if you are not a Tal fan, I would recommend this CD - it really is a tremendous value for the money. Not to mention that it also makes a good adjunct if you are studying any of Tal's Books (for instance Tal vs. Botvinnik, Attack with Mikhail Tal, Life and Games of Mikhail Tal - every one of these books is a classic).
Note: since I wrote this review, I've had a chance to work with the program a bit more. I've had no problems, and my recommendation still stands - it's a great buy.
Copy Protection
Must be installed from the CD.
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