Using Modern Chess Software for Opening Preparation

A wide variety of modern chess software products is available to the modern professional and amateur chess players alike, helping them improve their chess skills and prepare for online and traditional tournaments. These products include chess user interfaces (UIs), traditional Alpha-Beta (AB) and emergent Neural Network (NN) chess engines, game databases, opening databases and electronic books, chess-specific cloud services, tournament broadcast tools, online tutorials, tactical problem collections, and endgame tablebases (EGTBs). All of these tools except the last two categories can be used to work on opening preparation, an important component of chess training. In this paper, the author presents his computer-based approach to opening preparation tested in chess classes at the Russian School of Indiana for advanced beginner players. The materials used to develop the approach included game openings from the games played in the Free Open-Source Chess Engine Contest (FOSCEC) broadcast online by the author's CIT students at Purdue Polytechnic Columbus. We will discuss the choices of tools and equipment, how the more popular and/or promising opening variations were identified and analyzed, the lessons learned, and the future work. [For the full proceedings, see ED617389.]