I am thinking about taking up correspondence chess again, after about a 15 year layoff. If I do, I will probably do my record keeping electronically. Is their a “best” software to do this? I know ChessBase has some functionality for this, although I haven’t entirely checked it out yet.
I’ve always used ChessBase. I haven’t really tried any of the others. If you are just using it to keep track of the games and don’t want to compare to the databases, CBlight is free and works great and you won’t ever go over the 5,000 game limit playing correspondance.
I had someone buy me a copy of cbase 9 and I used it to compare my games to gm games of the same line, it was a bit tricky at first, but I figured it out.
Thanks. I already have ChessBase 9 and have ChessBase 10 on order, but I was curious if there might be software dedicated to the purpose of correspondence chess that migh work out better.
If you are going to be playing internet style correspondence chess, then I use and highly recommend a free program called ECTool. If you do a Google search on it you will easily find the site for it. It is presently a free download. I like it because I have the program actually scan the server of the email and it finds the messages from players I have a game with. I then have the program download the email messages, and the program actually extracts and records the game moves made by my opponent and highlights those games for me to go to and move on.
Another that a few people I play with is called Chess Pocket Tool. I have not been able to find it though.
I used the ChessBase 9 correspondence game function for a section or two of email games. I took more work and I didn’t like it as much as ECTool.
Post-A-Log
I almost started another thread asking a similar question (okay, for the one person who saw it, I did start a new thread and deleted it after I saw Kevin’s).
What correspondence chess servers have you had success with? I think this has been asked before, but I can’t find it.