Chessbase 17 Steam Review

I am a Chess player who likes to know everything I can about Chess. I mostly use free and Open-Source software to manage my Chess databases. However, because Chessbase is very popular among professional players, I wanted to try it out.

At first, I found this program confusing and wondered what I could use it for. What I found is that I could easily import any PGN database I already had. I had Caissabase and some other sources. Chessbase makes it easy to navigate imported databases and play through them. However, that really wasn’t something I couldn’t already do with Chessx or HIARCS.

But what I discovered is that part of the experience of Chessbase comes from the fact that databases, opening books, and courses can all be purchased separately from the Chessbase store. Basically, Chessbase is a store platform for Chess in the same way Steam is a store for video games. Does this justify the high cost of the Chessbase application? In my opinion, it does not. However, there may be features that I don’t understand yet because I am very new to using Chessbase. I will learn more and then perhaps update my review.

But regardless, Chessbase is very popular among the top Chess players and so it was worth my time to learn about this application so that I understand why it is helpful. I don’t regret my purchase of Chessbase 17, but I can’t help but wonder why the price is so high when free open-source applications like ChessX and En-Croissant have many of the same features.

If you want to purchase Chessbase, I suggest that you already have a database of games from another source. It could be quite useful for managing the databases you already have of your games from Lichess. I would also recommend using En-Croissant to download the free databases available, like Caissabase, and then exporting them to PGN format to be imported into Chessbase.