Advanced Chess School

Advanced Chess School is an interactive instructive tutorial for those unexperienced players, both children and adults, who have already learnt the rules of chess and now wish to become players of intermediate strength. Thus it can be considered as a continuation of “Chess School for Beginners” by Grandmaster Yury Razuvaev. Students will study essential concepts such as development, the center, fundamentals in chess tactics, basic endgame rules, learn what to do in the opening, how to win with a material advantage, exploiting an advantage in time or space, and much more! The chess material for Advanced Chess School was prepared by Nikolay Zhuravlev, chess master from Latvia, famous trainer and author of many books for beginners and intermediate players.

The program contains 2 large courses, “Theory – Essential Chess Knowledge” and “Playing Instructive Examples.

I. Theory - Essential Chess Knowledge.

A lot of theoretical material with easy-to-learn explanations. Includes five sections:

1) Utilizing a Decisive Material Advantage;

2) The Three Stages of a Chess Game;

3) Basic Pawn Endings;

4) The Fundamentals of Chess Tactics;

5) Utilizing a Material or Positional Advantage.

You have to find the most important moves. When you try to solve a problem and propose a wrong move, the program helps you with various visual hints (such as arrows showing key lines of attack), and, eventually, shows the piece which is to move.

II. Playing Instructive Examples.

To improve your chess knowledge, play selected instructive positions against the built-in playing program. There are three types of positions.

1) Mating Alone King.

2) Converting a Decisive Material Advantage into a Win.

When you fail to utilize your advantage, the program shows you the quickest winning continuation.

3) Playing from Any Position (in this mode “Chess School” operates as a playing program).
After you have solved a problem, you are given a ELO rating

This rating is based on the difficulty of the problem, the time taken, and errors if any you made. Your original rating is adjusted up or down after each exercise. The results of solving exercises are stored and can be compared between different students.

After studying theory, you can exam yourself in Test mode. The program automatically selects test positions for every student depending on one's level and the problems previously solved. Test results show the level of a student’s knowledge on the given topic. Help file as well as the manual gives detailed description.

Features of the program include:

• 55 lessons with more than 450 instructive examples to illustrate basic chess principles. Over 750 quiz problems and the built-in playing engine allow you to test your chess knowledge.

• Numerous text and visual hints to help a student find the solution.

• ELO and statistics in easy-to-read bar graphs, based on a students' success rate with the exercises in order to help keep track of one's progress.

• Useful for individuals as well as for coaches and teachers for it keeps track of time and score of eachposition for each student.

• Multiple users are allowed with an independent rating for each and other kinds of individual statistics.

• Statistics is stored.

• Built-in chess playing program Crafty to learn with or play against.

This course turns a beginner into an intermediate player!

Several languages are supported: English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

No additional software is required.

System requirements:

Essential:IBM-compatible PC with Pentium 75 CPU, 12 MB memory (RAM), Hard Disk (4 MB of free disk space for the program), VGA graphics, Windows 95/98 or NT 4.0, CD-ROM drive, Microsoft-compatible mouse.

Recommended:24 MB or more RAM, Super VGA graphics with 256 colors and 800x600 screen mode.