New Chessbase session with John Hartmann!

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Originally published at: https://killerchesstraining.com/2025/08/18/new-chessbase-session-with-john-hartmann/

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Dear Friends,

We have added a new class in the schedule. John Hartmann will have a session on Chessbase on Sunday, 31st of August, from 5 PM UK time. If you have any questions for John, please add them to this thread in our forum.

Julen is having a well-deserved holiday, so there will be no Analyse My Tournament class this week. You will find instead two Practical Rook Endgame classes with GM Vladimir Akopian – one on Thursday 21st and the other one on Sunday 24th, both from 5 PM UK time.

The online camp with GM Sabino Brunello will start next week, on the 25th of August. You can still join it by purchasing the camp in our shop. If you are a member, you will get it discounted, at 149 euros. All details about the camp can be found here.

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The camp is free for all members who purchased a new yearly membership or renewed their old one after our last online camp in February. Everyone else who wants to attend Sabino’s camp will have to purchase it in our shop. Click here to buy your participation ticket or here to become a yearly member and receive this camp for free!

Szymon finished on 50% in Mislata and gained 3 rating points. He is now headed to Barcelona, where he will play Sants Open.

Robert Fischer gained 54 rating points in 3 tournaments.

Karthik Venkataraman, Shahil Dey, Aradhya Garg and a few other members are playing in Abu Dhabi. You can watch the games live here.

Apaar Saxena is playing the 4Âș Festival Bella italia Lignano Sabbiadoro Open in Italy. You can follow the tournament live here.

Some members will play the Maia Open, in Portugal.

Tarun and Trisha will play in Slovakia.

Have you been playing any tournaments? We want to know!  Let us know on the forum or on social media.

Your friends from Killer Chess Training

Coming up in August: 12.5 hours camp with GM Sabino Brunello – free for new yearly members (sign-ups after the 20th of February 2025)

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Hi all - please put questions here if you’d like them answered during the session!

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Hi John,

Are you looking at any particular Chessbase version? Perhaps review the best setup for the various engines, and also perhaps how best to use the Mega reference database when searching for insights in a database of your own games - Opening deviations, Key games in the line played. Also how to best automatically analyse your games with comments/useful tips from the engine/database etc.

Thanks
Brendan

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We’ll probably go with CB18 as it is the most current.

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Hi John, preparing effectively for your opponent in correspondence chess

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I might not be the best person to tackle that – I’m only 2050 ICCF – but I’ll do my best!

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Hi John,

I watched your 2022 lectures and the ‘what’s new in CB17’. It already covers a lot of ground. So an incremental update of the new developments the past 3 years seems to make sense.

Some extra points:

  • My impression is that CB has been at the end of it’s innovation cycle for quite some time now. They are just milking it with small incremental updates. Do you see any changes or disruptive competitors in the near future?
  • What is your opinion of the let’s check feature?
  • Is it necessary to install tablebases locally or is there a free or cheap cloud version?
  • You showed how to run engine tournaments like Sadler. Any developments here?
  • What is the status of cloud engines. You weren’t very enthusiastic about Chessify, has that changed?
  • Could you briefly revisit the changed meaning of +1 in Stockfish? It wasn’t clear to me from the videos how the old +1 and the new +1 compare.
  • I’m not a fan of Chessbase’s replay training feature. (A poor attempt to replicate Chessable?) I heard about someone refreshing his opening lines by just watching Chessbase replay his files automatically. I haven’t been able to find a satisfactory way to do this with files including variations. Do you know how to do this?

Cheers,
Jan

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I’ll try to cover a lot of this!

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I saw there was a session named “Beyond Stockfish and Leela” on 7 Sep. But I didn’t see it in playback.
Is it cancelled?
Thanks!

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No, it was rescheduled for the 14th.

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Here’s the powerpoint from today in .pdf format!
250914 lecture revised.pdf (1.7 MB)

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Thanks for another great session. Like the idea of a ChessBase 18 session. Your content is unique and highly valued by us geeks, would love to see monthly sessions from you.

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Ideas for future sessions:

  1. How to gather training data with ChessBase 18
  2. LiChess + Chessbase = easy opening prep
  3. Configuring Leela for training games

Thoughts?

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These are all good ideas John. I think you also ran one on correspondence chess a few years ago, which would also be of interest.

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Hi @john.hartmann, only got around to watching your ChessBase lecture now. You shared a link to GM Kaufmann’s article on Engine evaluation and pawns - could you please share a link to that here as well?

By the way, former ICCF player here - saluting those who still have the courage of playing correspondence chess! :slight_smile:

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Hi , my name is Pardhu Kanaparthi. My uscf rating is 1582 and ID is 30250581.

Planning to buy chessbase 18. Need recommendations on which package I need to buy.

I am planning to learn more aggressive play. I learned Patricia is more powerful engine. How can I get this and which plan with my rating level.

Could you please guide us how to invest smartly without wasting much money.

Thanks

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Patricia isn’t more powerful. It’s just different. There’s value in that from a certain perspective, but using Patricia alone won’t help you learn to play more aggressively. (I suspect time spent with a good book or one of the Xmas Attacking Christmas courses would be better!)

For most people, the ‘program-only’ Chessbase 18 + creating a reference database from TWIC + Stockfish is plenty.

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