PART 1 • The position is set – what now?
Get an evaluation from a chess engine. This is the easiest and quickest way to get information, though not necessarily the best. Just fire up your favorite chess engine and let it chew on the position for a depth of nineteen or twenty-one plies.( Here ' s a tip: always try to have your engine analyze a position to an odd number of plies; some engines can get a bit“ blind” tactically at even ply search depths.)
... and inside of twenty seconds I have an answer. Houdini 2 thinks that 11... Ngf6 is best here, and if the full variation shown in the analysis pane is played, the position should be about even.
Many chess programs give you a command to let the chess engine play the best move its found in the position( hitting the keyboard ' s spacebar seems to be a common way to make this happen). Then the engine will start analyzing again from this new position. You can have the engine analyze for another nineteen to twenty-one plies, hit the spacebar again, and keep repeating the process. You ' ll often find that the resulting variation is a bit different than what the engine initially thought; that ' s because you ' re letting the engine“ creep ahead” move by move, always starting a fresh analysis from the new position – in effect, you ' re( artificially) letting it analyze deeper one move at a time. A few chess playing programs will do this sort of“ creeping” analysis automatically( notably Fritz and Aquarium; the latter offers a wider variety of settings and controls but is also a bit harder to use).
If you ' re feeling especially ambitious, you can have multiple chess engines offer their analysis of the position. Some programs let you switch engines with a few mouse clicks; otherwise you might have to set up the position in a separate program. I find it really beneficial to get multiple“ opinions” in this manner.
Have the engine play itself from the position. Many chess playing programs have a feature in which a chess engine can play games against itself starting from any legal chess position. This is a great way to see what can happen next from any given position, especially when you run multiple games and change the time or depth settings from game to game. Programs which allow the use of“ modular” engines or more than one engine at a time will often let two engines play against each other from a given position as well.
107 chessking. com