Chess Hero Help File

Chess Hero is a simple chess training tool. Your task is to guess the best move computed by a chess engine over a wide range of positions. On every attempt you are given a penalty, until you get it right. The nice thing about this program is that you will also get very ordinary positions. Positions where not much is going on. If you compare your move with the moves of the game or the engine, you will find subtle differences in the evaluation of the moves. In this kind of positions, if you play moves that are 0.2 pawns worse than the best move, you will eventually lose against better players. That is exactly how this program can help you a great deal: it is as if a trainer is continually watching and commenting on you.

Quick links
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Interface Engines Profiles Options Archive Credits

1. Interface
Control Buttons

Prologue: Displays the move just before the picked position. Resign: Resigns the position. The solution is shown and you are given a penalty that can be configured in Settings/Options. Game: Displays the move just after the picked position. Analyze: Enters analysis mode. Analysis output from the engine is shown in real time. You can move pieces around for both sides and browse game moves and engine variations. Note: Right mouse button takes back your last move.

Play: lets you play against the engine or along the game. You choose the line to follow by either clicking the first move of the game or the first move of a variation in the variations window. Note: Play is disabled for lines with only one move.

Next: Picks a new position.

The keyboard shortcuts for the buttons are F1 ... F6.

Variations window
The variations window holds the variations computed by the engine. Every variation provides the following information:

Type: An icon showing the type of move:

o o o o

the engine best the game move the successful attempt a failed attempt

Depth: The search depth reached by the engine. Score: The score of the position from the point-of-view of the side to move. Penalty: The difference in score between this variation and the best variation. The value can be negative if the variation is actually better then the best. This happens every time your move or the game move was underestimated by the engine because it looked unpromising. However, when the engine is forced to analyze it, it realizes that the move is better than the previously reported best. Moves: moves in short algebraic format. Note: You can browse the variation by using left mouse button, left and right arrow keys, Home, End and Esc.

2. Engines
Chess Hero can be configured to work with multiple chess engines, and supports both the XBoard and UCI protocols.

Configuring a custom engine

For any additional chess engine you may want to configure, you have to provide the following info:

Name: The display name of the engine. Executable: The executable file. Protocol: UCI (most engines) or XBoard (Crafty and many older engines). Chess Hero has been tested with Crafty and with a bunch of top-level UCI engines. Note: Chess Hero supports only XBoard protocol version 2.

Eval point-of-view: Point of view of the score computed by the engine. For a UCI engine this is automatically set to Side to Move. For a XBoard engine, you have to choose the right value. For example, Crafty always gives scores from white's standpoint. Init commands: additional initialization commands to be sent to the engine. For a UCI engine a configuration window is provided. For a XBoard engine, you have to write the raw commands.

Here are two sample engine configurations:

Notes:

noise 0 forces Crafty to emit full analysis information. mt = 2 starts two search threads in Crafty. In a CPU with four cores, two of them will be used by Crafty when searching (50% CPU load, in order to keep pieces animation smooth).

3. Profiles
A profile is a set of PGN files. The program picks the positions from inside these PGN files.

Chess Hero comes with a sample profile that is suited for a player who wants to improve his knowledge of the Evans Gambit as White and the Queen's Gambit Declined as Black. Also, some tactical positions and the games of a strong GM are included. In addition to the PGN files, you can set the following options:

Keep statistics for: Number of history days to keep (these are used to compute the average penalty and are shown in the statistics window). Reset statistics on exit: Reset both penalties and times on program exit.

As soon as you get acquainted with the program, you should really create a custom profile that fits your playing style and training goals. Good choices for your PGN files are:

Master games that match the openings you play. Your own games. Tactical positions from well-known collections. Games of your chess hero.

Configuring a custom profile

For every PGN file in a profile, you must provide the following configuration data:

PGN file: the PGN filename. Move number: the minimum and maximum move numbers.

Half-move ordinal: the ordinal number of the half-move. Side to Move: the allowed side-to-move. This can be:
o o o o o o o o o o o o

any white black first: first color to move in the game. second: second color to move in the game. winner: the winner of the game. Games with no winner are not picked. winner white: the winner of the game if white. winner black: the winner of the game if black. loser: the loser of the game. Games with no loser are not picked. loser white: the loser of the game if white. loser black: the loser of the game if black. name: the side to move has to match the name of a player. Matching is partial and case-insensitive. Useful to play from the standpoint of your chess hero. name opponent: the side not to move has to match the name of a player. Matching is partial and case-insensitive. Useful to train against a fixed opponent.

Weight: relative weight of this PGN file compared to the others. The higher the weight, the higher the chance for the positions in this PGN to be picked. Note: this is not a percentage. The percentage is given by: Weight * 100 / (sum of all the weights in the profile). Note: weight can be set to zero to disable entries in the profile.

Max time: the maximum time to guess the best move. If zero, no limit is set. Max attempts: the maximum number of attempts to guess the best move. If zero, no limit is set.

Pick mode: the way the positions are picked from the PGN files:
o

Random: a random game is picked, then a random position inside the game is picked. Sequential: the first position of the first game is picked, and so on until the last position of the last game (comes in handy if you have a set of tactical position you want to play in a fixed order). Random + Sequential: a random game is picked, then the positions from the game are picked sequentially.

Is Book: if checked, all the positions in the PGN file are tagged as "book positions". No engine evaluation is performed on book positions: you are just asked to guess the next move in the game. The penalty for a wrong move can be configured in the options. This option implies the "Game move is best move" option below. Note: this option is helpful to skip book positions when they are accidentally picked from another PGN file (see "Allow book positions" below). This is less crude than just using "Min move number" to skip book positions. Also, this way you can train on early deviations from your book. Note: book files are meant to be small (say less than 100K). Large book files will slow down the program.

Allow book positions: if checked, profile positions tagged as "book" are picked from this file. Otherwise, they are skipped. Game move is best move: if checked, no engine evaluation is performed on your moves: you are just asked to guess the next move in the game. The penalty for a wrong move can be configured in the options. This is useful for mate-in-two problems and the likes.

Note: setting tight filters, such as "min move number = 100", forces the program to scan a lot of games. This may take a huge amount of time and will result in an application freeze. So, it is better to pre-filter your PGN files.

Configuring tactical positions

For most tactical positions, the following settings should be fine:

Half-move ordinal: 1 Side to move: any

As an example of a custom profile, see my Mixed profile:

A short explanation of the profile: 1. master games matching the openings I play as white . Moves range is 1100 because I prefer to skip book moves using two book files (see below) rather than using a fixed min move number. This way, the program will pick both positions beyond my book and, more importantly, early deviations from my book. 2. master games matching the openings I play as black . 3. a bunch of tactical positions. Note the settings for tactics_CTS: the file contains tactical positions where the first move is a prologue move. So, I want to guess the second move. 4. my book as white. This is used to skip book positions when they are picked from another PGN file. Weight is non-zero so that positions in this file will pop-up during training (you can set weight to zero to prevent this). Moves range is 4100 to skip really basic moves. 5. my book as black 6. my games as white 7. my games as black 8. the games of a strong GM. These are filtered by name so that I can play from the point-of-view of the GM.

4. Options
General

Font size: the font size of the application. Minimize to Tray: minimizes the program to the tray area. Central layout: six ways to arrange the board, the prompt and the buttons. Central layout spacing: the space in pixels between the elements of the central layout. Highlight prologue: highlights the prompt in yellow when the prologue is played.

Highlight side to move: highlights the prompt in white or black, depending on the side to move. Play best on time out: automatically plays the engine best when a timeout occurs in a timed position. Play best on max attempts: automatically plays the engine best when the max number of attempts is reached. Always show game: always shows the game moves when a position is over. Always allow Next: enables the Next button even if the problem is not solved.

Board

Graphics: graphics for the board. You can customize the graphics by selecting a folder with the required PNG files for dark and light squares. Note: the size of the images should be large enough to accomodate the largest possible square. Light squares brightness: brightness of the light squares. Dark squares brightness: brightness of the dark squares. Show coordinates: shows algebraic coordinates around the board. Highlight squares in analysis: in analysis mode, the program highlights the start-end squares of the engine best.

Pieces

Graphics: graphics for the pieces. You can customize the graphics by selecting a folder with the required SVG files. Note: the piece inside every SVG document must have id piece.

Size: size of the pieces relative to the size of a square. Position: vertical position of the pieces inside the square. Drop shadow: paints a shadow below the pieces. Move mode: three different ways to move the pieces with the mouse. Animation speed: animation speed of the pieces.

Default highlight timeout: highlight duration for non-user moves. User highlight timeout: highlight duration for user moves.

Time Bar

Position: the screen position of the time bar (left, top, right, bottom) Spacing: the space in pixels between the time bar and the board.

Engine

Max think time: the maximum time the engine is allowed to think in order to evaluate the moves. Stop at same depth: Forces the engine to stop evaluating the user and game moves on reaching the same depth as the engine best. This is meant to achieve faster evaluations.

Scores
All the following scores are in centipawns, that is in hundredths of a pawn:

Success threshold: the highest penalty that is still considered a success. Moves that get a penalty below or equal to this value are considered ok and let you advance to the next position. Min score: lower limit for the scores provided by the engine. Max score: upper limit for the scores provided by the engine. Max penalty: upper limit for the penalties. Resign penalty: the penalty that you get when you resign. Wrong move penalty: the penalty that you get when the "Game move is best move" option for a PGN is checked and you fail to guess the next move in the game. Time out penalty: the penalty that you get when you run out of time. Max attempts penalty: the penalty that you get when you run out of attempts.

Game

Show opening name: shows the ECO code and the opening name of the game (on older computers this may slow down the program, so it is off by default).

Archive

Enable: enable/disable the archive PGN file. This is a file generated by the program to store and review the positions you play (see below). Archive file: the PGN file where the positions will be stored. Max games: the maximum number of games to store in the archive PGN file.

5. Archive
You can review the past positions by opening the Archive window (either through the Tools menu or by typing CTRL-A):

The columns:

#: progressive number of the position in the PGN file. The higher the number, the more recent the position. Date: the date on which the position was picked by the program. Profile White Black

NumP: number of penalties Avg: average penalty Time: time taken Solved: Yes if you succeeded on first attempt, No otherwise. Hits: number of times the position occurs in the archive. A position can occur in multiple games, or it can be picked more than once. AAvg: aggregate average penalty. This is an average penalty that takes into account all the positions matching the current one (see hits above). Yo can sort by this column to see your worst-scoring positions.

Every stored position can be deleted, saved or copied into the clipboard. Also, you can analyze a position or replay a set of positions. You can also filter by a position to get all the positions that match it. For example, this is what happens if you filter by position number 200 above (either using the right mouse button or by clicking Filter by position):

6. Credits
Engine
Chess Hero comes bundled with TogaII as the default chess engine.

The TogaII chess engine is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. You can download the GNU GPL Package (incl. sources) with Toga II based on Fruit at: http://www.superchessengine.com/, or send an email to togaII@gmx.de. For a copy of the GNU General Public License, please visit http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

Graphics
Pieces Condal, Harlequin, Kingdom, Leipzig, Line, Lucena, Mark, Marroquin, Merida, Millennia and Motif are based on fonts by Armando Marroquin. Pieces Alpha and Berlin are based on fonts by Eric Bentzen. Pieces Cases are based on a font by Matthieu Leschemelle. Pieces Chess Ole are based on a font by Frank David. Pieces Cburnett are designed by Colin M.L. Burnett. See Wikipedia for more information. Pieces Good Companion are based on a font by David L. Brown. Pieces Smart are based on a font by Christoph Wirth. Pieces Pirat are based on a font by Klaus Wolf. Pieces Traveller are based on a font by Alan Cowderoy.

Translations
The following people provided translations for the program: Dutch: Wijnand Engelkes engelkes@xs4all.nl

Russian: lobanov69@yandex.ru

Thanks to everyone listed above!