Excellent article. What are your views about using coins to accelerate engine speeds online or using other engines apart from Stockfish, e.g on Chessify or ChessBase?
I did find both of them useful in specific situations. I'm not sure I've a specific detailed explanation that's be easy to follow, but broadly speaking I find the very strong engines good to use when I have an intuition that there may be something in the position that requires very deep consideration. Sometimes it's when there are two interesting moves and it's not clear which is better. Sometimes it just looks like the position is very rich and there may be something hidden.
But to be honest, you can probably work without ever using these and get to 99.9% of the same results.
Unfortunately the chessbase corr database is incomplete for ICCF games. As an example, it only includes 324 of my own ICCF games rather than the 550. I’ve seen similar with other players. Better in my opinion is Ultra Corr from Tim Harding. Unfortunately his last update was 2025. I just add the newest ICCF games to that. I have CORR 2026 from chessbase also, just to be aware of what users see there and for the correspondence games from sources other than ICCF. But would recommend anyone using just chessbase corr to also download the iccf database and be prepared to add the missing games (at least as you prepare for opponents).
Excellent article. Few things - The coins on Chessify get drained pretty quick and there is a danger that you could spend all of accidentally kept running. No way to limit coin usage. The cloud engines for windows take a while to load and the online coin based engine has a latency of upto 2 min to start.
I bought the OM CORR one off and add ICCF archived games every month.
The Aquarium has a learning curve and just a few YouTube videos by a British Chess player but no recent ones.
I use Hiarcs for Mac and Windows.With Lc0 on Mac as it has separate graphic processors with metal back end.
On chessify coin engines, as I've said in another comment they are fairly optional, and also chessbase cloud engines are an alternative that sometimes works more seamlessly. Though I guess it also drains the ducats quickly sometimes!
Good point on aquarium, I'll try to write up something on how I use it. If anyone who's an expert wants to co-write something do let me know. I'm sure there are people who use it much longer than me.
Both chess engines on Mac and choices of hardware are also good topics. I've not used hiarcs so I did not mention it, but indeed I've heard it's also a good tool (I think I won a discount to it once in an iccf tournament).
Excellent article. What are your views about using coins to accelerate engine speeds online or using other engines apart from Stockfish, e.g on Chessify or ChessBase?
Thank you, Ian, appreciate it!
I did find both of them useful in specific situations. I'm not sure I've a specific detailed explanation that's be easy to follow, but broadly speaking I find the very strong engines good to use when I have an intuition that there may be something in the position that requires very deep consideration. Sometimes it's when there are two interesting moves and it's not clear which is better. Sometimes it just looks like the position is very rich and there may be something hidden.
But to be honest, you can probably work without ever using these and get to 99.9% of the same results.
Unfortunately the chessbase corr database is incomplete for ICCF games. As an example, it only includes 324 of my own ICCF games rather than the 550. I’ve seen similar with other players. Better in my opinion is Ultra Corr from Tim Harding. Unfortunately his last update was 2025. I just add the newest ICCF games to that. I have CORR 2026 from chessbase also, just to be aware of what users see there and for the correspondence games from sources other than ICCF. But would recommend anyone using just chessbase corr to also download the iccf database and be prepared to add the missing games (at least as you prepare for opponents).
Thanks Matt, that's very useful to know! Indeed it's tricky to be sure the database is complete. All of them miss something.
Excellent article. Few things - The coins on Chessify get drained pretty quick and there is a danger that you could spend all of accidentally kept running. No way to limit coin usage. The cloud engines for windows take a while to load and the online coin based engine has a latency of upto 2 min to start.
I bought the OM CORR one off and add ICCF archived games every month.
The Aquarium has a learning curve and just a few YouTube videos by a British Chess player but no recent ones.
I use Hiarcs for Mac and Windows.With Lc0 on Mac as it has separate graphic processors with metal back end.
The Chinese database was a good discovery.
Thanks
Pankaj
Thank you Pankaj, appreciate it!
On chessify coin engines, as I've said in another comment they are fairly optional, and also chessbase cloud engines are an alternative that sometimes works more seamlessly. Though I guess it also drains the ducats quickly sometimes!
Good point on aquarium, I'll try to write up something on how I use it. If anyone who's an expert wants to co-write something do let me know. I'm sure there are people who use it much longer than me.
Both chess engines on Mac and choices of hardware are also good topics. I've not used hiarcs so I did not mention it, but indeed I've heard it's also a good tool (I think I won a discount to it once in an iccf tournament).
Best wishes,
Paweł
This is excellent and very helpful for a newbie. Thanks!
Thank you John, appreciate it!