Product Description

Chessmaster: Grandmaster Edition expands the scope of chess to include broader principles of learning. Josh Waitzkin's much-anticipated book The Art of Learning (Free Press) is designed to pave the road to successful long-term growth on and off the chessboard. The eight-time National Chess Champion and two-time martial arts World Champion puts users in his shoes in some of the most riveting and formative moments of his chess career, including the legendary climactic game from the book and film Searching for Bobby Fischer. Waitzkin then turns to the classics, introducing beginners to brilliant games from some of the most important players in the history of chess. In his most revealing commentary ever, Waitzkin not only teaches the beginning chess player the fundamentals of the game, but also humanizes the road to mastery. Never has chess been so exciting.

Learn Chess:

• Extensive course on the basics of chess taught by International Chess Master Josh Waitzkin.
• Tutorials from Josh Waitzkin's groundbreaking book The Art of Learning.
• Attacking Chess course commentary by Grandmaster Larry Christiansen.
• Famous Games: 900 of chess's most important games presented and analyzed.
• 600,000+ game database.
• Coverage of all classic and modern opening variations.

• Training mode: play one of many predefined opponents and analyze your game.
• Ranked Play: test your skills against a variety of opponents and establish your rating.
• Play 1 of 50 predefined tournaments or create your own.
• Set up a position to solve chess problems or reproduce famous positions.

• Play with a friend via Internet or LAN connection.
• Play rated and unrated games, tournaments, ladders, simultaneous exhibitions, watch other matches, set up/take chess lessons via LAN or Internet.
• Play 1 of 12 new chess variants including Limited Shuffle, Shuffle, Giveaway, Marseilles, Progressive, and Pocket Knight.
• Play correspondence chess.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #671 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: UBI Soft
• Model: 68366
• Released on: 2007-10-30
• ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
• Platform: Windows
• Dimensions: 3.00 pounds

Features

• Extensive course on the basics of chess taught by International Chess Master Josh Waitzkin
• Tutorials from Josh Waitzkin's groundbreaking book The Art of Learning
• Attacking Chess course commentary by Grandmaster Larry Christiansen
• 900 of chess's most important games presented and analyzed; single or multiplayer gameplay
• 600,000+ game database; coverage of all classic and modern opening variations

Customer Reviews

A great way to learn chess
This is how I, my 10 year old son, and 6 year old son learned to play. The tutorials and advice were excellent.

The only reason it did not get 5 stars is that it has a bug where if you start in tutorial mode one needs to reset the layout in order to get the icon for the menu which will allow you to get out of the mode and play a game. Other than this it seems to work fine.

A word of advice, check the suggested processor and memory before buying and installing it. Using the game on a slower processor causes the 3D games to be so sluggish they are unusable.

Greate gameplay!
Chessmaster 11 is a great mentor for chess.
The lessons, for those who love the game, and those who just started, are so interesting you simple can't put it aside.
greate gameplay and training modes!

Severely Flawed
I was excited about chessmaster. I had recently gotten interested in chess, and I thought this would be a convenient and fun way to learn some of its finer points.

Initially I thought the game was really good. I started out going through the chess lessons, and I really felt like I was grasping the game better.

Once I thought I should take a break from the lessons I tried playing computers. When I did so though I ran into (one of) chessmasters flaws: the game took up 100% of my cpu and the game came to a complete standstill. I went to chessmaster's support page and forum looking for some sort of solution to my problem. To my surprise, not only was it extremely common for users to experience the same problem, but there was no real solution. A few users suggested some work-arounds, but none of them worked for me or many of the other users. So basically, I can't play a simple game of chess against a computer opponent because the program then takes up all of my cpu. Everything else is fine. I just can't play against the computer in a real game. My computer is well above the minimum specs too.

What makes matters worse too is that this has apparently been around since chessmaster 10, and no one did anything about it. Also, representatives of ubisoft argued that it was not the program at fault, but the users. Sounds like great customer service to me.