 Chessbase 9 is the long-awaited sequel to the extremely popular Chessbase 8 database program. I picked up a copy (expensive!) and was eager to try it out. The setup program was the first sign that the look-and-feel has been dramatically improved. The installation went smoothly, with simple options to copy the Big Database 2004 and Player Encyclopedia to my hard drive (Chessbase 8 made this more difficult).
The overall look and feel is greatly improved.
One of my favorite new features is the ability to manually sort the games in a database. Simply drag games to where you want them in the database game list, and select "Fix Sort Order."
Chessbase 9 now has the Chess Media System, which can play Windows Media Files. They are starting to produce some CDs with video of the instructor along with fully animated board and pieces.
Chessbase 8 required you at times to set the color of text twice before it would take. Chessbase 9 has fixed this annoyance.
Chessbase 8 on a hyper-threaded machine would sometimes corrupt databases for me. Chessbase 9 seems to have fixed that. The "show threat" feature is something I turned off fairly quickly. Especially if you like to diagram your games with colored arrows, the interactive "show threat" arrows just confuse matters.
Chessbase 8 allowed you to enter a variation which started with the same move as the main line. This is invaluable for showing how the end of a game might have continued. From what I understand there is pressure to add this feature back. A cumbersome workaround is to enter a variation of a nonsense move, promote it to the main line, enter a variation of the duplicate main line move, promote it, and then delete the nonsense variation. (This has now been fixed with the patch.)
Chessbase 8 allowed you to search for game in a particular position with a specific player. You can still do this in Chessbase 9, but it requires you to first search for all games in a particular position, and then filter those by a specific player. This can take forever when there are many games for the position. For example, if I want to see all games after 1.e4 with Michael Adams as White, I first have to scan for all games with 1.e4. That takes a good deal of time. Chessbase 8 allowed you to specify the position and the player before any searching starts, and it then better utilizes database indices for a much faster search. In Chessbase 9, you can select a player from the Big Database 2004, then filter by a position, and this is fast. Unfortunately it doesn't show you statistics on opponent replies, or on the position in the filter.
(Some of these may have been fixed with the patch, but there are still some regular lockups that haven't.)
Unfortunately, it looks like Chessbase 9 was shipped a little prematurely. When copying TWIC databases into the Big Database 2004, it almost always hangs up and requires me to kill the Chessbase process. The games seemed to copy okay. I got it to copy without locking up the program by unchecking "Themes" prior to copying.
Chessbase 9 will sometimes lock up, particularly after playing multimedia files. I have heard that some people have had Chessbase 9 lock up so often it's unusable. Chessbase 9 seems to be much more resource intensive than Chessbase 8. On my P4 3Ghz with 1 gig of RAM it seems to run fine. On my P3 1.3 Ghz with 512 MB RAM it struggles to keep up at times.
Last, and worst of all, I've had single games vanish from a database. This has happened three times for me since installing Chessbase 9, and this is unacceptable. If you use Chessbase 9 before patches come out to fix this, be sure to regularly back up your databases and check to make sure no games are missing often.
Rating: 6 out of 10 (after applying patch)
(8 out of 10 once more bugs are fixed)
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