Should you buy a Chess program to study?

Analysis of different Chess GUIs available

One of the great things about Chess is that you can play for free either online or over the board if you have a local friend willing to play.

Most of the time, a person doesn’t need to spend any money at all on the game of Chess. However, I am not a normal person but someone who wants to know everything about Chess.

The official website for stockfish (the world’s strongest Chess engine) has a convenient list of the best Graphical User Interfaces and how to install and use them along with the stockfish engine.

But if you are a new Chess player or you are looking for serious advice on how to improve at the game, I have a serious warning.

Computers don’t play Chess like humans do. They look ahead and make a move that may make a different 50 moves later. Therefore, playing against the computer or even using a computer to analyze a game can mislead you into thinking a move is bad when it may actually help you win, or maybe it will tell you a move is good but not have the means to tell you why in the same way a human can.

Therefore, when analyzing which GUI you want to use, I will be talking about which of them helps you better analyze your own games with human reasoning. I will present 4 options. 2 of which are free and 2 of which are programs you can buy.

Free programs

What I find myself using the most lately is a free and open source program called En-Croissant. It lets you automatically download a database of the rated games you have played on either chess.com or lichess.

Frank Willow, the creator of the program published a blog post on lichess.org about it.

Another great program is liground. It allows using the computer to analyze not only Chess but also variants like Crazyhouse, Shogi, Xiangqi, and many others. If you only play standard Chess you probably won’t make use of it but if you are someone like me who loves all games that are similar to Chess, you may find it helpful just as I have.

Paid

The stockfish site I linked to earlier recommends 3 different programs you can buy: Chessbase, Shedder, and Hiarcs. Of these options, only Shredder and Hiarcs are that good.

Shredder is mostly for playing against the computer. It can keep track of your games and even assign you a rating that goes up or down depending on how you win or lose. However, it’s not that special beyond this. Perhaps if you are looking for a nice program to play against customized strength stockfish and want to download something because you don’t have a reliable internet connection, it’s pretty good. The interface looks really nice and it does let you import and export PNG files of individual games.

Hiarcs is the better option for me because I don’t use it to play against the computer. I prefer to use it by downloading my own databases of games from lichess and stepping through them. The same can be done with En-Croissant, but the fact that you can open different PGN files and have them in different tabs is a huge bonus. Another thing that is a selling point for me is that it allows me to type in the hex codes for exactly what color squares I want the light and dark squares of the chessboard to be. This is important for someone like me who cares about the appearance of the chessboard for streaming and recording videos.

I will mention that there is a program called Chessx which is similar to Hiarcs that is free and open source, but the user interface leaves much to be desired. I think you might want to start with it and then if you like it, you might want to buy Hiarcs because it just looks way nicer and does not have trouble loading larger database files.

Conclusion

These are my current recommendations for programs serious Chess players might want to use if they have a PC. The open-source free options also work on Linux too if that is important for you.

Both Shredder and Hiarcs also have mobile app versions too, but I find them to be not as great as the desktop PC version.