Bookup 2000
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Bookup 2000 Professional
Written 11/04/2000
As regular readers of this page are aware, it has been a while since
I’ve reviewed
Bookup. Since that time, the program has undergone a
couple of revisions, the latest of which is called Bookup 2000. Bookup
is one of the few chess programs produced in the US, and can lay claim
to the fact that it is one of a very few opening repertoire databases
on the market.
And what the heck is an opening repertoire database anyway? To make a
long story short, this type of database is used to store the moves
that you will play in the opening phase of the game. So programs of
this type must provide you with an easy way to annotate, store,
retrieve and edit this information (Bookup uses a chess tree for
this), along with methods to determine if certain moves in your
repertoire are good or not. For this purpose, Bookup provides you with
access to computer analysis features.
So the best usage for Bookup is to store your own personal
"theory". When you need to learn a particular opening, you
enter the moves on a graphical board, and then practice them against
the computer. And Bookup has random training, which allows you to
practice all the variations in a particular book at random. Then,
before you go to a tournament, you print out your books in ECO-style
tables. You take these tables to the tournament, and use them for
practice.
There has always been some confusion over whether to call Bookup a
chess database or not. I have always maintained that Bookup is more a
tool for maintaining your own opening repertoire. With this current
version however, Bookup has taken some steps toward becoming what I
would call a full chess database. For instance, there is now a
facility in the program for doing a so-called header search, in which
you can search for games by particular players, in a particular year,
etc. Games found using the search can then be viewed in a separate
board window. There are also a number of other new features added, and
you can find more information on them at the Bookup web site. So I
won’t launch into an exhaustive discussion of all the new
features. But I will talk about some of the more important ones.
The two biggest improvements in the program would have to be the
incorporation of Bookup’s Joy of Chess (JOC) and book export
facilities. The JOC is another acronym used to describe the CAP
(Computer Analysis Project) data, the brainchild of Dann Corbitt. Dann
has been coordinating an effort to analyze the opening phase of the
game with a large number of computers. Bookup makes the CAP data
available in a small window, which contains the computer
scores/evaluations for all moves leading away from the current
position, along with the score for the proposed principle variation
for the current position. These principle variations have been
computed in advance, and stored in a large file. So lookups of this
information are instantaneous. With previous versions of Bookup, you
needed to do this computer analysis yourself, which could take some
time. Now the odds are that the position you wish to evaluate is in
the CAP data.
I mentioned that you now can export books in PGN format. In fact, you
can either export your books as individual games, or as one big game
with nested variations. There are a number of uses for this. One thing
you can do is use a program like Fritz or Chess Assistant 5.1 to check
your repertoire for blunders (that is assuming that it doesn’t
show up in the CAP data). Of course there are many other uses for this
feature as well. Speaking personally, this is one of the functions I
have been wanting for some time.
There are also a few other features that bear mentioning. Mostly, they
deal with making transpositions easier to work with. For instance, now
the presence of a different move order to reach the current position
is denoted on the Bookup main window. This makes it very easy to spot
transpositions in your repertoire. Additionally, you can see a list of
other move orders that resulted in the current position with the click
of a button.
And this brings up a general remark that I would like to make about
most of the offerings from Bookup. While their programs may not have
every feature known to mankind, they are generally quite easy to use,
or figure out. Those of you that get a little bewildered with your
software may want to take this into account.
As far as analysis engines go, the Zarkov engine is no longer included
with Bookup, but Crafty is. You can use a number of other winboard
compatible engines as well. So this new version has also improved on
the quantity of engines that can be used with the program. All the old
external engines are also supported (i.e. Mchess, Genius, etc).
In the beginning of this article, I mentioned that Bookup now had a
header search facility. And while this is a very welcome feature, the
program could also use a positional and material search capability as
well. To mitigate the lack of a positional search feature, Bookup does
allow you to search by move order. And while the header search
facilities will be fine for most people, you do not get other
sophisticated search and indexing functions either (other programs
call these keys or libraries). So Bookup is not the equivalent of
Chessbase or Chess Assistant. And to be fair, neither Chess Assistant
nor ChessBase are ideally suited for maintaining your own repertoire.
So to sum up, I think Bookup has added a number of welcome features in
this release. Importing and exporting of books has been greatly
improved, as has engine support and transposition handling. If you get
the professional version you will also get easy access to the CAP
data. Bookup seems to be maturing as a database, and is still the best
choice for maintaining your own repertoire, but is not yet the
equivalent of what I would consider a full-fledged chess database.
If you want more information on Bookup, I would suggest you go to
their website.
Copy Protection
Must have serial number to install. Serial number is printed on the
CDROM, which has no copy protection.
