Need Help

Hi guys, I'm new to using chess programs. How do i save a game in rybka 3 so i can look it over again another time. The reason I'm asking is because I like to run the annotated games in rybka and on my chess board at the same time SO i want to save the games for the next time i study. On a side note this is the first time I've studied chess, does anyone want to suggest the order i should go about Month 1 and/or Study methods. Any help Will be greatly appreciated

A chess program is usually just an .exe file which work as a console application (i.e. command line).

So you need a GUI to run it.

If you purchased Rybka 3 you may have Aquarium, but it's not mandatory. Anyway this gui is not bad at all.

You can run almost any chess engine in Arena, it is free and does the work (there are still some small freeze bugs, but after a while you get easily along with).

http://www.playwitharena.com/
http://www.playwitharena.com/directory/download.htm

I recommend you get also the mainbook so you can see the opening tree when you replay a game.

On the "Engine, links" page you get directed to many chess engines, a lot of them are free, like crafty for exemple.

On ce you have configured arena design to your expectation, just do "install new module" in the module menu (Rybka is UCI) and that all. Select it by default.

So each time you load a pgn and launch "analysis", the chess engine will be operating on your game.

For PGN editing and database operations however, Arena is not very good, prefer chessDB which is also free.

http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/


I also like to have a light utility to replay games, Chesspad is good for that, doesn't have many features, but it is small and board layout is not too ugly (compared to many chess programs).

http://www.wmlsoftware.com/chesspad.html


If you have some money to spend, Fritz interface offers also some nice functionnalities like blunder search, and move suggestions, while in Aquarium the IdeA move explorer is interesting.

For database, i got Chessbase Light in the same package as Fritz, but it is not very outstanding, Chessdb do quite the same job for free.

I advice you go with Arena to begin, it's a nice interface and run almost any chess engine, you can also make engines compete once against another or play against computer. You can select a different opening book per engine.

The only issue with Arena is it does not support wild chess variants (like loser's or atomic i play quite often).
If you are interested in these variants your only choice will be the good (ugly) old Winboard.
But in this forum, we discuss only regular chess !

http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html

Finally, to play online chess, get BlitzIn or Dasher to play on ICC and Babachess to play on FICS.
You can play online with Arena too, but i do not recommend it, it's not well adapted.

http://www.chessclub.com/helpcenter/interface/blitzin_download.php
http://www.babaschess.net/

Babachess is good but a little pain in the ass to configure the layout to your desires, once it is done just save the config file and put it in the chest not to loose it ! Anyway once configured properly it is very enjoyable.

For ICC, i prefer BlitzIn to Dasher mainly for the board layout which is better (i like the Dyche3 pieces and blue chessboard), and because i get used to it for playing loser's and atomic when this wasn't supported yet in Dasher. Anyway Dasher offer better chat features with tabbed window for chat. But with some experience, you can manage your channels in the command line, just as well in BlitzIn.

So i guess you are ready now

There is a thread devoted to discussing how people are working through the first month material:
https://icsdiscussion.forumotion.net/ics-month-one-f3/getting-started-at-ics-how-are-you-going-through-the-material-t5.htm