FAQ
Information on Chess Openings Wizard – the world’s most sophisticated chess training software.
“What will I gain by preparing with Chess Openings Wizard?”
You will learn chess theory faster – and you will remember more of it.
You spend valuable time shuffling pieces to get to important positions. Chess Openings Wizard ultimately eliminates distractions such as leafing through books and magazines, deciphering notation and dealing with opening codes and typographical errors. With COW you will cover more material in less time. Your increased learning speed (and decreased distractions) actually allows you to remember more of what you learn.
With books and game databases it’s up to you to find out if more information is available in a different game or a different chapter. Chess Openings Wizard brings information together, so that you will not be left wondering whether this position occurred in a different, more instructive game or whether another chapter of a book would contain more analysis. This instant transpositional feature – unique to COW – shows you the contradictions in chess theory and saves you time.
You have limited time to study chess and our ebooks can train you to play a grandmaster’s opening repertoire in a fraction of the time you’d spend with a book or game database.
You have read the same chess books over again and found that you were “learning” it all over. Chess Openings Wizard trains you to make sure that you have nailed the ideas down in your memory.
“Am I strong enough to benefit from Chess Openings Wizard?”
If you have ever looked up your opening moves in a chess book then Chess Openings Wizard will revolutionize the way you study. If you wrestle with published chess theory (or if chess is your profession) you will squeeze even more from this tool. COW is designed for professionals and is effective for club players.
“What is the Theory Machine?“
The theory machine is the combination of Chess Openings Wizard with a playing/analyzing program such as Shredder, Crafty, Ruffian, Fruit, Chess Genius, MChess Pro, WChess, Zarkov, HIARCS and Rebel. Chess theory in COW format can be annotated – and corrected – by these extremely strong playing programs. With your theory machine you can find the flaws in your chess books and get ideas for extending your knowledge.
You will get constant analysis while you study with Chess Openings Wizard – even while you enter your games! COW includes the Crafty and Ruffian chess engines.
Chess Openings Wizard and the various playing programs do not require each other – but they become an extremely powerful tool when you team them up together as a “theory machine.” The idea is to have a strong playing program annotate your complete games including the variations – even your entire opening repertoire.
“How is Chess Openings Wizard different from game databases?”
Chess Openings Wizard is quite different from game database programs such as ChessBase™ and Chess Assistant™. COW concentrates on storing chess positions that form a tree of analysis. Rather than display only the moves and notes from a single game, COW shows all of the recorded moves in every position regardless of their source. You cannot duplicate your effort because each position appears only once in a COW tree. This model of chess theory can include both the positions from master games as well as the positions that have already been worked out in chess theory.
Rather than store lists of games, Chess Openings Wizard stores chess theory in trees of positions, much the way theory is recorded in books such as the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings and the Encyclopedia of Chess Endgames. COW allows you to create your own ebooks and work with ebooks created by chess trainers and authors.
Game databases concentrate on storing the moves of thousands of chess games. If you are scheduled to play a particular international master, chances are excellent that you can use these programs to quickly find many recent games by that player. You can replay these games on your screen and prepare for your match. Most international masters prepare for matches with ChessBase and/or Chess Assistant. If you are a rated master (or plan to become one shortly), you should definitely purchase a game database.
Chess Openings Wizard does the research for you. To see everything about a certain line of play, you simply click your way through the variation. All annotations and all recorded move options are displayed instantly. Contrast this with a game database, where you must first identify the variation by its key (usually an opening code), then ask the database for a group of games that match the key and finally study the games one at a time. ChessBase and Chess Assistant each offer the capability of viewing a limited number of games in a tree format – but without COW’s editing, training or transposition features.
“How is Chess Openings Wizard used with a game database?”
Game database programs provide the thousands of recorded master games that make up modern chess theory. About half of all Chess Openings Wizard owners also use either ChessBase or Chess Assistant. Here is how you can make the programs work together:
The game database programs can create PGN files which are text files much like what you’d have if you typed the moves of the games into a word processor.
You export all the games with a certain opening from a game database and then have Chess Openings Wizard read that file and automatically update its ebook with any new lines of play from the games. The ebook then becomes a clearer, more instructive view of how masters are playing that particular opening.
You can then play training games against the ebook until you have committed the ideas to memory. You can also add new ideas from your own experience and extend the tree-shaped ebook, possibly with help from a playing program or from chess books about the opening. This is the fastest way on the planet to expand your opening repertoire.
“Doesn’t a positional database take up a huge amount of disk space?”
Not really. As an example, a database of games with 1,000 games which all begin with 1.e4 e5. would take up at least 2,000 bytes in game system such as ChessBase because each move is packed into 2 bytes – but the moves must be stored in each game. In contrast, Chess Openings Wizard would use a total of only 80 bytes to store the positions after 1.e4 and e5. These positions would only be stored once in the tree regardless of how many games contained these positions.
The game system must also provide an additional index of key positions to classify games – while Chess Openings Wizard is already indexing every single position so no extra index is required. Of course, COW will continue to consume roughly 40 bytes for each position that is unique to a single game. This is what allows COW to instantly spot transpositions even in middlegames, endgames and subvariations – not possible with a game database.
“What about the chess engines?”
For years the top engines have beaten grandmasters and challenged the world’s best players in match play.
Stockfish, Crafty and Ruffian are included in Chess Openings Wizard
Many of these programs can annotate your Chess Openings Wizard data. Imagine having an international master-strength program analyzing your games or your opening ideas all night long. This is exactly what players are doing now. Once you have an ebook of an entire opening, you might be at a loss for ideas on how to extend your knowledge beyond the standard lines. These strong playing programs can be told to analyze only the last position in each of COW’s variations and place the suggested line of play in each position’s comment. Because these programs easily analyze at master-strength at tournament time controls (e.g. 2 minutes per move), their analysis is extremely thorough when they are left to analyze a set of positions all night long. This “theory machine” feature allows you to get strong analysis from a playing program without requiring an extremely fast computer – simply allow more time. Seeing the results is as easy as viewing your COW ebook.
“You’ll hassle me if I want to return something, right?”
No way! Absolutely not. A theory machine is much more power than most players need and you risk nothing when you purchase any product from Bookup. You can try any of our products for nine months and if for any reason you decide to return it we will issue a refund immediately. Really!
“What if I need technical help?”
We’re a phone call away for Chess Openings Professional owners. You can also email your questions to us or post in the COW experts forum. To keep you coming back for more of our products we make sure that what you have is running to your satisfaction.
The buck stops here, too. When you ask for help, you’ll talk with the software developer. There has never been a charge for our technical help. Our newsletters help you get even more out of your software.
Many Chess Openings Wizard owners can be found online and chances are good that one of them will help you before we even get the chance.
Email can be sent to
“What’s the difference between the Express and Professional versions?”
As of this writing, build 53 is the current version for the Professional and build 55 is the latest for the Express version.
Both versions have complete editing capability. They can export diagrams in text format for use with various chess fonts. Some free fonts are included. They can play training games against you to test your knowledge of the ebook. They both run Crafty, Ruffian and other Winboard and UCI compatible engines.
Features that are unique to the Professional version include the ability to print analysis sheets similar in appearance to pages from the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings or Batsford Chess Openings. It can combine ebooks and purge ebooks of deleted variations. It can use EPD files to analyzed any collection of position overnight. It can backsolve any tree of analysis to point out the critical lines. It includes toll-free support via phone from the programmer.
“What about Bookup as a company?”
You are dealing with the first company to offer a chess database product for personal computers back in 1984. Each new release of Bookup software becomes the standard to which other database products are compared. Your upgrades will certainly continue the trend and you’ll get generous discounts.
The theory machine is our entire focus. You get every advantage of each advance in technology as we improve the products.
Besides pioneering chess databases, we were the first to sell systems at reasonable prices without copy protection. To be sure you can get inexpensive ebooks we continue to encourage chess authors to prepare books for Chess Openings Wizard – without charging any royalty. Ours is the only company to make our programs open to programmers so that the rate of innovation stays high.
We guarantee our work. If you are not satisfied with our products for any reason, you can return the product for an immediate refund of everything you have invested.
“What about program upgrades?”
In the past, we have allowed owners of the current version of Chess Openings Software to apply their entire purchase price towards the purchase of an upgraded version. Some of our past upgrade offers have been even more generous.
“What are Chess Openings Wizard’s features?”
You can store and retrieves chess games. You’ll record games more easily than with any other system because the moves and positions are stored in a tree. This way chances are good that your entire opening (and possibly the middlegame) are already part of the tree and you don’t have to enter those moves again. Contrast this with game databases in which each new game must be entered from move one – and then classified.
You can animate the playback of your games and variations. You can sit back and observe analysis with little effort. You can play mock games of chess against the tree of analysis, enabling you to teach yourself opening theory naturally and in the fastest way possible.
You can print out its tree of analysis from any position in a format similar to that found in the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings (ECO) and Batsford Chess Openings (BCO). You pick the starting position and the desired variations. This feature is unique to Chess Openings Wizard Professional.
You will see all transpositions instantly as Chess Openings Wizard detects any repetition of the position as well as middlegame and endgame positions that have already been recorded via different move orders. This feature works regardless of the move order. It’s an excellent tool for authors of chess opening books. COW is the only system with this capability.
You will have an easy time using your mouse to enter new moves and navigate through the trees of analysis.
You can import games from PGN text files. Files of chess games in PGN format can be found on the Internet and can be made by game database programs.
You can export games to ASCII text files to facilitate publishing and export diagrams in text format.
You can integrate Chess Openings Wizard with Ruffian, Crafty, Fruit, Chess Genius, HIARCS, Zarkov, MChess Pro, Rebel and other strong playing programs that can annotate any set of positions you want. These programs calculate both the best continuation and an assessment for the position — and the results are automatically keyed into Bookup’s comment area of your ebook for each analyzed position.
You can combine books that were developed separately. This process matches up moves and comments for identical positions and can also compact your ebooks after you have removed variations.
You will see no practical limits on the number of possible moves or variations from a position. You can add thousands of keystrokes of commentary to each position. You can place billions of positions in a single ebook.
You can jump directly to any position of interest. You can give names to positions. The ebooks keep track of where you left off. If you are a correspondence player you will love Chess Openings Wizard!
You can set up positions at random for puzzles or middlegame and endgame studies.
The most important feature could be the readily available ebooks which you can use immediately to expand your opening, middlegame and endgame knowledge faster than any other self-study method on earth.
“What do I need to run Chess Openings Wizard?”
Chess Openings Wizard for Windows requires Microsoft Windows 10/8.1/7.
“What does it cost?”
Chess Openings Wizard Express Trial can be downloaded free. It is a ‘read-only’ version of COW that can display and train you with any ebook. It can import and display PGN games. It also includes a 30 day trial of the Express editing features.
Chess Openings Wizard Professional for Windows is $197. Chess Openings Wizard Express for Windows is $67. Ebooks are available from $10 to $29. COW and the ebooks can be downloaded immediately.
We welcome MasterCard, VISA, Discover, American Express, a money order or your personal check.
You can place your order online with confidence, using our Secure Ordering System.
“What if I have more questions?”
You want quick, clear answers to your questions and we would be happy to provide them. Our product is a highly technical one and you might be more concerned with learning new theory than figuring out your computer. Give us a call or send us an email.
“What should I do next?”
If you’re not sure about all this, start by contacting other chess database companies and finding out what they think about Chess Openings Wizard. You will find that a theory machine is the most useful chess “book” you’ll ever buy.
“Is there more information?”
Sure. Read our descriptions of ebooks. Try the free Chess Openings Wizard Trial. While online, ask others how they use COW. If you have any questions for us, please call our toll-free number and ask us directly. We’ll be glad to help you.
The Guarantee:
“You get an absolute ironclad money-back guarantee for nine months. Why so long? Because we also guarantee that your chess rating in the next printed supplement will show you the difference in using Chess Openings Wizard software. We even guarantee that you will have fun with our products. If not, please contact us for a courteous refund.”
Michael Leahy, President
Products and companies mentioned in this article:
Bookup™ 2000 for Windows
Chess Openings Wizard for Windows
Bookup Corp.
(614) 321-5345 international
NICBase™
New In Chess
(800) 354-4083
ChessBase™ for Windows
ChessBase USA
(800) 524-3527
www.chessbaseusa.com
Chess Assistant™
Chess4Less
(877) 89CHESS
www.chess4less.com
www.convekta.com
Shredder, MChess Pro, Chess Genius, HIARCS
I.C.D. Corp.
(800) 645-4710
www.icdchess.com
PGN chess files and chess news
Internet Chess Club
(412) 362-6334
www.chessclub.com
Bookup is proudly distributed throughout the United Kingdom By:
CB Software
66 Marsh Lane
London NW7 4NT
0181 959 0670
0181 906 8771 fax
www.chesscenter.com
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