So who is Fritz? Well, the better question: What is Fritz? Fritz is one of the most powerful chess engines in the world. In fact, Fritz has won numerous world championships and is the top product offered by ChessBase. I remember when I used to play chess professionally we didn’t have computers that could beat humans consistently. With Fritz, you can rest assured that you have a computer that will try to beat you anyway possible. Playing with Fritz not only will improve your overall chess knowledge, it will make you more experienced in coping with tough situations, as that is what Fritz will put you in.

So let’s take a look at a bunch of features that come with Fritz 10:
• Multi-Language Support
• Training Feature
• Opening Book
• Graphics
• Online Play
• Game Analysis
• Multiple Engine Support
• External Board Capability

Whether you are French or German or you understand only English, you can appreciate Fritz 10 in your own language. Fritz 10 chess also comes with voices in different languages to make playing chess much more fun. Fritz is available in available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and German.

While Fritz can be as strong as any master that you have ever faced in your life, Fritz 10 allows you to fine tune it and also make it weaker if you prefer to have close games or beat it. This feature is great as it allows you to set a baseline for your chess knowledge, and overtime you’ll be able to beat Fritz as your game improves. Over all, this feature will allow you to have fun while playing the game of chess.

Speaking of playing chess, the training feature available through Fritz 10 is legendary. Not only you can practice opening and endgames with Chessbase interface, you can also practice middle games and solve puzzles as you wish. This is a great feature that combined with sparring mode (a mode that computer makes tactical mistakes on purpose and alerts you when that happens to test your chess knowledge) can help you move to the next level in Chess. Fritz’s chess opening book is brilliant as it has more variations in it than any book in the market. Also, a database with more than a million games provides the basis for state-of-the-art analysis. Finally, With Fritz 10’s Chess Media System, Fritz brings the world’s greatest chess players into your living room, in full high resolution video and sound and a synchronised graphic chessboard. You can listen to Garry Kasparov, Viktor Korchnoi, and so many others while they explain important openings and ideas that lead to success.

The Graphics in Fritz 10 are superb. You have many chess boards to choose from, and the 3D boards in real view are out of this world. This was one of the main reasons that I kept updating my Fritz, but obviously Fritz 10 is much stronger than Fritz 8 or 9. But don’t worry. Whenever Fritz 11 comes out, you will get a considerable discount on your update.

The online play feature is one of the best features of Fritz franchise. Chessbase’s servers are arguably the best place to play chess online, and with Fritz 10, you can connect to these servers and take advantage of complementary subscription that is offered with Fritz cds. Don’t forget that you can pit your Fritz 10 against others’ engines such as Junior 10 and Shredder 10 and see how exactly your Fritz fares against those. You can always fine tune and change your Fritz’s options, so you will always have a chance to make your Fritz perform even better against other computers.

Fritz is not only a chess playing monster. It also allows you to analyze your games and even comments and annotates them for you. Not only can you use Fritz to run a deep analysis on your games, you can also use compare analysis to compare Fritz’s take with that of other engines such as Junior, Nimzo, and Hiarcs. You can even compare different Fritz modes with compare analysis such as aggressive and passive modes. Fritz supports multiple engines. Not only it supports Chessbase chess engines such as Nimzo, Junior, Shredder, and Hiarcs, you can also download engines such as Rybka, and Toga, and use them under Fritz 10’s interface. Chessbase is UCI compatible and that will allow you to throw terrific chess engine tournaments right on your PC. In addition Fritz is backward compatible, so Fritz 11 will be compatible with Fritz 10 and previous versions of Fritz.

If you are one of those people who prefer to get down and dirty and play on a real board, then you can use Fritz 10’s board interface feature to interact with a digital chess board. Digital chess boards are a nice addition to your Fritz package and will allow you to record games as you play them. You can also connect a chess clock to them and play a real match thanks to the advanced Fritz 10 interface.

Over all, Chessbase’s Fritz 10 is an excellent addition to your chess collection. If you have been reading many chess books, and now you feel the need to put what you have learned from these books into practice, Chessbase is an excellent choice. Also, if you are a chess geek like me, you will appreciate this new addition to chess engine family. With Rybka, Fruit, Hiarcs, and Fritz, you will have four of the strongest chess players in the world at your disposal and then just imagine the possibilities. Best of all, Fritz is now fully compatible with Vista, and it is getting discounted by Amazon to $24.95! So get Fritz 10 and enjoy having a chess monster in your room!

New in FRITZ 10: enhanced and improved chess engine developed especially for the 2006 Kramnik vs Fritz match; extended openings book; updated database; dynamic graphic tips for attack and defence; improved graphics and move entry on the 2D board; new high resolution 3D piece sets in classical wood; live display of the thinking process on the chessboard; more efficient position analysis.
New chess server features: additional ranking lists, full rankings for all players, filters for challengers with bad Internet connections, new and simple video conference function, bullet lists in the engine room, animated global weather display, direct link to Google Earth.
System requirements: Minimum : Pentium 300 MHz, 64 MB RAM, Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Windows 2000 SP4 DVD ROM drive, Windows Media Player 9.
Recommended: Pentium III 1.4 GHz or higher, 256 MB RAM, Windows Vista, GeForce5 or compatible graphics card with 64 MB RAM or higher, 100% DirectX compatible sound card, Windows Media Player 9, DVD ROM drive. Fritz is Windows Vista ready!