Tournament Room:
You play "rated" games or hold mock tournaments. There at least 50-100 different "personalities" that you can play against... different "people" that prefer different openings or style of play. This can be interesting to play against different styles and different levels. The downside to this is that the poorer moves they make is not typical of how a poorer human would play. Typically, you might push a pawn to attack a piece and the computer progam of "1400 rating" may leave it hanging. A real player rated 1400 does not make such dumb obvious misses. The tournament is nice but after you play your game, you have to sit and watch all the other games. Boring. You can play in 2D or 3D. However, even after a patch installed, it still crashes when I switch to 2D mode, though the 3D is much better than in CM 2100.

Game Room:
Allow you to play unofficial games against any personality or yourself. You can see what the Chessmaster is thinking the best line should be and what the "score" of the game is. Two of the better features are the "find the best move" and "analyze game." The "find the best move" will sit an analyze for a specified time, then play out the best sequence of moves, with audio, showing what the best line is. The "analyze game" spends a specified amount of time analyze a game and it will tell you what moves it agreed with, what moves you missed, if you missed a mate, etc. I use it to evaluate real games I have played in tournaments. It's almost like having a master go over your games with you. This is a very good tool.

Classroom:
This is a great feature. You have many tutorials and drills for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. These include annotated games, chess puzzles, finding mate, checking mating with given pieces and annotated games. Whatever level you are at, you can learn something from it. Then you have session called "Josh." Josh Waitzkin is a International Master and subject of the move "Searching for Bobby Fischer." Josh has audio sections of annotated games, endgame examples, and psychological aspect of competition. This is a nice section, because you can sit back, watch and learn. The pieces move, a human talks, and I've learned a bunch from it. It is more geared to intermediate-advanced players. I can sit back at watch instead of having a board and book and having to mull through variations... instead its played out for me.

Library and Database:
The library and the database has a bunch of stored games and opening book for reference. I haven't spent much time here.

This is 5 star program that almost gets a star knocked off for a couple bugs (It also crashes if you switch profiles.). With the program, the database, and the learning tools, all for $30, you can't go wrong.


Chess Master 9000 is a great program!   September 15, 2002
Lawrence S. Tamarkin (Levittown, New York USA)
40 out of 41 found this review helpful

I highly recommend the latest version of ChessMaster - It combines almost every imaginable feature one could
want in a playing program, and includes many tutorials, some by Josh's first chess instructor, Bruce Pandolfini!

It has at least 150 different historic and custom made 'personalities', some of which are children players and beginners.

The manufacturer of CM 9000, the Ubi Soft company provides good customer support for this product, and is quite responsive to user feedback, for new features in the next versions.

I've never been disappointed in a ChessMaster program, which is updated about
once a year. The program is advanced enough for masters, yet comprehensive enough for complete beginners and children. Also, the price is quite nice for such a complete program.

Since getting this program, I have used some of the Waitzkin tutorials, and tried the Rate your chess feature, as well as a few of the Larry Evens and John Nunn problems. The program is very rich in all these different tutorials, and is
very challenging for me as a USCF Life Master with a FIDE rating of 2184. (USCF, 2042).

I found it significantly better organized then previous versions of the same program. I do reccomend the following improvements for the next version though;

1: Make the 2d boards resizable using the drag & drop via the right mouse key.
(In fact, please make all windows resizable via draging).

2: Make scrolling through the moves in a game possible with the right arrow key in any envirement, including the tutorials (Use a switch to activiate it, if this is an envirement where you are normally not suppossed to do this, choosing to scroll through moves here, being equivelent to ending the test).

3. Make all the moves of the Josh Waitkin games replayable via the right mouse key, even though Josh only analysis some of his games at the critical moment.

I really hate having to search the database seperately to see all the moves of
these games, & I'm not sure that they are always included in this database either. Also, sometimes Josh refers to his opponent or himself playing a game in this or that same line in an event - I'd really love it, if he would include this refered to game in the database, or better still, in a seperate 'Josh Waitkins selected games' database - A possible new database for a future version!

The above being said, I really think that Josh Waitzkin has found a beautiful, instructive & unique ninch as a chess commentater with these Chess Master products - I've enjoyed his lectures more then any others, and I hope he continues doing this for a long time to come!

Larry S. Tamarkin


All i want from a chess software   October 27, 2002
Canay (Hillsboro, OR)
33 out of 33 found this review helpful

This is a complete chess program.

I also have chessmaster 8000, but was not able to run the tutorials effectively. In this version I am having no problems. If you are looking to buy the software my recommendation would be to buy it for the tutorials and for the analysis part of the software. Online gaming is a possibility but hey you have that for free on yahoo's site. And yes you have a lot of different types of chess boards to choose from and to customize how the pieces look, but who really cares about these details?

Tutorials are amazingly insightful. Often the problem with chess books is that they have a diagram and they talk about this diagram for a couple of paragraphs, and unless you really can visualize thanks to years of experience, or else if you make the moves one by one on a chess board as you read the book, you cant really get the jist of what is being conveyed. With CHESSMASTER 9000, however, The moves are made on the board for you step by step as you read the tutorials (or rather they are spoken to you), key moves are shown with arrows, squares and pieces are highlighted etc.

There are 3 levels for the tutorials, beginners level, intermediate and advanced. If you want your kid to learn chess, just start them up with the beginners level. They do not even know how to read in fact, because the computer speaks the paragraphs for you.

The intermediate part of the puzle starts with whites first move, then blacks first move, then whites second and blacks second... all the way up to blacks 4th move. There are 20 to 30 examples for each category.

The other sections of the intermediate tutorial are:

- The 5 basic themes
- The Endgame
- Kings and Pawns
- Queens and rooks
- Minor piece endings
- Mating configurations
- basic combinations
- roots of combinations
- Double attacks
- Sacrifices
- startegy

In the advanced tutorials section, you try to guess the moves of grandmasters from actual championship games. Again, there is detailed analysys for every move.

You will be able to find an opponent from every skill level. There are many personalities to chose from. Lastly, using the score feature for moves, you can enter your moves from real life games step by step and [assess] which move you went wrong, or where you could have made a better play. Definitely 5 stars.


Chessmaster 9000 WILL support Windows XP   July 26, 2002
Michael R. Mckinnis
46 out of 52 found this review helpful

Chesssmaster 9000 will indeed support Windows XP, however it will not support Windows 2000. The following is from chessmaster.com:

The next version of Chessmaster (due to be released around the beginning of September, 2002) will support Windows XP/ME/98/95. There are no plans to make the next version of Chessmaster support Windows 2000/NT.


Review by Class A chess player   May 26, 2003
Brent Caldwell (Lubbock, Texas United States)
31 out of 34 found this review helpful

As a class "A" chess player rated at 1850, I can say that chessmaster is probably the best chess program available if you are serious about chess and want to improve your game. If you are looking for better graphics, it doesn't have a whole lot to offer (in fact, it doesn't even have my favorite "bird's eye" view like CM 5000). However, there are so many tutorials on every aspect of chess that it is almost certain that you will come across something you didn't already know. One could easily spend a month going through all the tutorials and annotated games it has.
Also, the skill level has increased to being on par with the world champions (appx. 2800). If you are a novice chess player, then you probably won't notice the increase in skill level (it will whip you like all other chess programs), but if you are an advanced player, then you CERTAINLY will notice the difference. I could at least make CM 5000 work for its victory, but CM 9000 freakin' demolished me! It has improved my game significantly, and renewed my interest in the game.