Territory visualisation.

Hello, i search a software capable of showing territory information similar to the picture below (made manually).

(click on image for full size)

In fact i would like to be able to see for each square which player controls it.
Here i put :
- white/black box for squares controled by 1 player only
- grey box for squares mainly controled by 1 player but threatened by the other player also
- green box for uncontrolled squares (holes)
- and red squares for squares controlled equally by both players (h6,h4,c5,b4,... could also be red, but whatever)

I didn't find any option in Arena, Winboard, Fritz and Aquarium to do this ! There are options to see attacked pieces but it's not enough, especially for endgames where it would be very pratical.

Do you know such software ?
In fact a HUD would be great.

Let us know if you find anything that would be great!

Chessmaster does it.

Ok, don't have it, but i believe you.

If you don't own any version of chessmaster I would definitely recommend buying Chessmaster 11, also known as the Grandmaster Edition.

There are stacks of tutorials, including over 20 hours of Josh Waitzkin audio commentary with annotated games and an endgame course, plus loads of other tuturials by Yasser Sarawein and Larry Christiansen, puzzles by John Nunn and tons of tactics and other stuff as well.

Although not as strong as Rybka or Fritz and the like the analysis is pretty cool as well, giving you a brief overview of the entire game, i.e. play was balanced, one player dominated, the game was decided by a move blunder etc, and it then tells you explicity how many moves it agrees with and how many it disagrees with for both sides, and the relavent point error both sides incurred, both potentially, and the actual total exploited by the opponent.

For some games I analyse with Rybka and Chessmaster as Chessmaster is better for pinpointing exactly the specific and major errors in a game as it literally highlights them for you, whereas Fritz can be a little harder to decipher sometimes.

It also has spoken audio commentary on your games which is quite helpful. There is a play button and it will play through its annotation on a move for you, and with audio tell you what the result of the move or sequence of moves was, for example it will say

'Better was.........(and then give its analysis with the following commentary) 'As a result of this series of moves White exchanges a knight and pawn for a bishop and pawn and his pawn structure is improved, whereas Black's pawn structure is slightly worsened. Additionally Black's king safety is compromised slightly and White's position is slightly improved.


I'd say chessmasters analysis is pretty good in terms of verbose commentary.

Also it has hundreds of personalities to play against, including many grandmasters and tournaments and leagues to set up, to make playing computer opponents as fun as can be possible.

Even my actual own chess set a House of Staunton Hastings set in blood rosewood is rendered in 3D along with dozens of others!

I'm a big fan of this program!

I have used a number of the chessmaster series & to be honest there is little significant improvement from one version to the next. Most of the comments said above are fair. Other than for a very short period I could not get their online chess to work so I don't use it. But for a easy less intense tactical refresher I like it. It is definitley the spoken word from Josh Waitzkin in it is remembered much better than that which is written. ( I may be in danger here of jumping into a debate on another page so I'll be careful). With the price of software these days I think it would be extremely valuable for learning from 0 - 1500 or so. After that I reckon the course we are doing is much beter. CB11 cost about £12 ($US 18) and about £8 for CB10. I don't know about prices in other countries but for here extremely good value.

Yeah they are a lot like Fritz in that you certainly don't need to get each new version, most changes are incremental. But the great thing is that they carry over everything from earlier versions so if you don't own any version of Chessmaster the newest version is of tremendous value.

It's worth it for the Josh Waitzkin tutorials alone imo, there are literally hours and hours worth and he is an exceptionally good lecturer I think, certainly a refreshing changing from Chessbase's less than steller presenters. I'm talking here purely about his delivery rather than content, I love the chessbase trainers but possibly Andrew Martin aside their team is made up of a 'quirky' bunch to say the least lol.

I love the fact you can get a rating and play against personalities too. If you are ever in the habit of playing against a computer for training games or whatever Chessmaster is much more fun than anything else out there as every profile has a photo and brief (and usually stupid) biography which makes it possible to have rivalries with computer Ai's. Plus setting up massive swiss style tournaments is cool too!

For someone who doesn't have any version I'd consider it an essential purchase, you'd get at least 40 hours out of Josh Waitzkin, probably another 40 trying to solve all of John Nunn's puzzles, and they have some great courses as well, I really enjoyed the opening course where you had to guess the correct move for each of Black and White's first to fourth moves. A great introduction to openings and how to work out opening play on your own.

Damn I should get that. Sounds like some good chess porn!!!