Introduction to Chess Assistant video course of flash animations

Chess Assistant development staff created a video course including several flash animation videos. This course is designed to support the user’s work with Chess Assistant documentation. We hope that you will find there answers to your questions and solutions to some of the problems that you may encounter while working with Chess Assistant.

Basic functions of any database include finding, viewing and retrieving stored information. Chess Assistant features powerful means of searching through its databases according various criteria. Below we enlist some flash animation videos illustrating various ways of searching the specified chess information.


New Opening Table mode — this mode was designed to promote learning of complicated opening variations.
New Opening Table mode (Continued) — this mode was designed to promote learning of complicated opening variations.
Comments search — searching for various types of annotations in the games is demonstrated.
Header search — here you can find example of searching a database according to specific data given in the game header – players, their ELO rating, tournament, place etc.
Maneuver search — searching for specified maneuvers occurred in games is illustrated, for example, searching the bishop sacrifice on h7.
Material search — here are the examples of searching for specified alignment of forces.
Opposite color bishops — this flash animation illustrates searching for positions with the opposite colored bishops.
Position search. Part I — searching for a specified position.
Position search. Part II — searching for a specified position; saving the search criteria is illustrated, as well as using the chessboard’s local menu.
Searching for horizontally and vertically symmetrical positions.
Combining searches — as the name suggests, combining various kinds of searches is illustrated.
As for retrieving information, Chess Assistant allows you printing games and sets of games — see Print.htm demo.
Exporting into a static web page — with Chess Assistant, you can also prepare web documents for publishing them on the Internet. See Web export – eng.htm demo for exporting into a static web page and into a Java controlled web page.
Miscellaneous ways of automatic opening preparation — slightly more complicated way of retrieving information presumes obtaining various reports from Chess Assistant databases.
Examples of implementing basic editing functions — apart from searching and retrieving information, you can also edit games stored within the Chess Assistant databases and save new games into them. Implementation of these basic editing functions is illustrated in
Annotating moves — Annotating moves.htm flash animation is dedicated to working with Chess Assistant’s annotation editor. Using the Chess Assistant clipboard, as well as the Windows clipboard greatly facilitates the process of editing games. These functions are illustrated in flash demos
Implementing drag'n'drop technique — some important basic techniques like “drag-and-drop” and using the object browser (the leftmost part of Chess Assistant window in View mode and List mode) are illustrated in the flash animation videos
Removing duplicate games from database, Resorting and saving a database — the flash animation demos illustrate such important devices in working with databases, as removing duplicate games from database and re-sorting a database according to some specified criteria.
Managing database library; multichange utility  — flash animation illustrates implementation of the multichange utility that helps you managing the databases’ libraries. By using it, you can easily standardize a library, removing dubious or odd entries in it.
Dataset sort, Dataset subtract  — Datasets are operating units in Chess Assistant. Advanced users of Chess Assistant are welcome to refine their notion of a dataset with the aid of Dataset sort.htm and Dataset subtract.htm flash animation videos that illustrate implementing particular operations with datasets. See also DOBDD1.htm demo, where the dataset notion is explored more deeply.
Operating trees in Chess Assistant  — Tree operations.htm demo is devoted to operating Chess Assistant trees. Note that some instances of reading information from trees and implementing it in analyzing games are also given in Chess3.1eng.htm, Chess3.2eng.htm, Chess3.3eng.htm and BGA1.htm
Split Mode in Chess Assistant  — It is worth mentioning that Chess Assistant features the Split mode. Split mode combines features of the Tree mode and the View mode; implementing it is illustrated by the Split.htm demo.
Nalimov Tablebases, linking and implementing  — Naturally, the most interesting and complicated features of Chess Assistant are connected with managing and exploiting the chess engines – specialized chess analytical and playing programs. For example, it is well known that most of the chess engines are practically ‘blind’ in the endgame, especially when it comes to some drawn endgames. TheNalimovTablebases.htm demo deals with linking and exploiting the Nalimov endgame tablebases that helps in overcoming this serious drawback.
Searching for blunders  — simple in usage but efficient searching for blunders mode allows you to locate mistakes in games quickly. Setting various parameters of this mode turns it into quite a powerful analytical device.
Implementing the Infinite analysis mode of Chess Assistant is deeply explored in Chess1.htm, Chess3.1eng.htm, Chess3.2eng.htm, Chess3.3eng.htm and NewChess1.htm flash animation demos. Pay the attention, these demos provide a nice practical example of implementing various features of Chess Assistant in analyzing a chess game.
No doubt, the background analysis (BGA) is the most powerful analytical tool of Chess Assistant. Implementation of BGA is illustrated in BGA1.htm demo, together with using information from CAP tree.