Why no PGN/FEN?

I am getting sick of the never-ending manual transition of positions into my engine.

I think it is slack of ICS to not include a FEN/PGN of each problem so that users like me, who can't see why certain lines are forced, can EASILY put the problem into the engine to explore the why's and why not's of a position / tactical problem.

Is there a reason for not including basic stuff like this in the problem solutions documents?

Yep, this was a recurrent complain, although in year 2, they have made an effort and for the 3 first months i get, all chessbase files are included, this is great!

I imagine that converting back all stuff of year 1 is boring, so we don't have it.

But as i said before i have converted a few things (not much) into PGN, i guess that some of you did that on your side. Maybe if we gather all that "not much" stuff in common, i believe we can have many PGN already.
Maybe we can send to BDK ?

Yes, that is a good plan. Pity I never bothered to save all those I manually entered.

I know they strongly recommend doing these problems on a real board, which partly could be the reason there is no PGN/FEN but the problem is that they don't answer all lines in the solutions. I am often deciding against playing the "best line" due to a counter that I have seen. When I can't see what should be done against that counter I have to enter it into an engine so that I can improve my understanding of the problem.

I am learning that it is not so much my understanding of strategy / positional awareness that is my problem now, it is my calculation errors... it's almost balancing, so I am still very happy with the ICS course in general :-)

I feel your pain!

If not pgn/fen at least game references need to cited so we can do further independent study.

For example in month 9 they make reference to a position in Game 7 - Month 5. Problem is that the position doesn't occur in the referenced game. And when I search the databases the position never occured.

In the very next example Karpov - Browne, 1972 they state that the next step is to play e3, then d4 to open the d-file to put pressure on a backward d-pawn. However, in the game this never actually occurs, and I had to go to an exteral database to learn this.

Furthermore, I can't count the number of times that I've been playing over one of the pdf files only to reach a position that doesn't make any sense. Then when I check the database I discover that I "played" a wrong move at some point and have to go back and start over.

Having the CB Files is essential, and if they are not going to provide the material in that format they should at least inform prospective students that a chess database is necessary to take full advantage of the course.

Indeed!

But really, is it that hard to drop a FEN in for each position / game? Sure it means someone at ICS has to do a little work, but it would benefit all students, giving us less to complain about!!

I think folks are right that they plan for people to go OTB, but on the other hand some people just use computer. It would be convenient for them to have the positions set up for us already, for sure, but I don't think they originally intended this to be a computer-centric course.

I'd be wary of us providing such stuff here. While positions are technically not copyright, it would probably not make them happy if we provided all the positions. I prefer to err on the side of caution with these matters, and hope they continue to update things and provide such content for subscribers.

I agree there, we can't go and post all the FENs publicly, that would be wrong.

But at the same time, they really should provide FENs/PGNs in the solutions file so that we can find out why the line we were seeing was wrong or didn't work.