Making Your Opening Book Stronger

The best chance of getting your performance up is the book. Players who tune their books to get the strongest lines will always have the advantage (almost regardless of hardware) over those who use readily available “off the shelf” books. I have seen players with relatively modest hardware get very high ELO just by working on their book and adjusting the lines. This is because once a book is used in the engine room and people play against it, they then analyze their games and adjust the book moves so that what may today be a strong line in in your book could well have become a weak line by tomorrow if you play the same player again.

My advice is to start with a base opening book that has been made from engine vs engine games Rybka II was a good book when it came out but is now a year old and the lines have been superceded by stronger ones that people have put into their book. I would recommend download the latest Kevin Frayer Tour book from http://www.frayerchess.com/home or use Perfect 13.ctg from http://www.sedatchess.com/perfect13_book.html, and use the book as your base.

One simple way to tune a book is to play back over your drawn or lost games to the point at which you leave the book phase (ie. no more book moves). If the evaluation was equal or negative for you at that point, then run Rybka in infinite analysis in that position (say to depth 19 or 20) and whatever it come out with as the strongest move you put this move into your book so that next time you play that line, the engine will choose the stronger move. This is time consuming but it is the way to make your book play stronger moves than other people’s books. Also if you can kibitz games by high ELO players, then look back at those games (they are stored automatically in your Fritz) and change your book to mirror their strong lines !

In terms of how to manually edit the book – if you have the little booklet that came with Fritz 9 then in sections 5.6 and all of section 11 give details. Also there is a manual on the Fritz 9 DVD . Pages 49 to 54 give some instructions to have a look at. Meanwhile I will try to give a brief pointer:

Go into Fritz and do File/Open/Openings Book and select the book you want to edit. Then select the Openings Book tab on right hand side of screen. Basically you can either

a) add a new move to the book, To do this right click somewhere in that book area (not on a move just in empty space) and tick Allow Move Adding. then when you play back through a game and want to add new line, just make the move on the actual board and then select new main line from the options. This will then have added the move to the book.

b) change the ‘weighting’ of an existing move making it more/less likely to be chosen. This is shown in the Prob / % column. To change it right click on the actual move itself and do change weight. The value is from -125 (very unlikely to be picked) to +125 (very likely to be picked). You can change these manually to any value. Actually this is what the automatic book learning does based on whether games are won or lost – but this is how you do it manually.

c) or mark moves either red (means they won’t be played ever) or green (mean they will be picked, with a probability given by the % column). To make a move red right click on it and select Don’t play in tournament
To make a move green right click on it and select Main Move. You might want to make a move red if you find that at some point in the book line you had a negative evaluation and therefore you can mark that move red so it won’t be played again.

There is more to it than this but this should give you enough to start editing your book which is a great start and you should see an improvement in results once you’ve started to tune the book like this.

Hope this helps – good luck.

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