Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

At the time I am typing this there are two other poor reviews. This is nothing unusual for this product. People are regularly pointing out how it doesn't compare to professional grade products from Chessbase (like Fritz). Unfortunately for the multitudes of amateur chess players that are looking to improve, those reviews don't help you make an informed decision. I coach a scholastic chess team, and the Chessmaster line is extremely good and highly recommended to any beginner to intermediate chess player, particularly parents of aspiring chess children. The tutorials are among the best you are going to find anywhere for learning the basics of the game. There are actual lessons, and lots of sample chess positions (puzzles) to hone your skills, as well as new content included in each new iteration (and yes, it does re-bundle the material from the previous versions). Even if this product could not play chess at all, the lessons and tutorials are easily worth twice what this package costs. If you already have Chessmaster X then you have to decide for yourself the marginal value of the new content. I have gone through the first few new Waitzkin lessons, and they are well done and entertaining. The new chess sets modeled after House of Staunton are pretty good. The Parthenon set I have in real life is not captured in complete detail, but it is still pretty well done. Chessmaster's 3D engine is, hands down, the most functional of any chess product on the market by anyone. This package runs well under Vista. There is already a patch out for it, so you will probably want to download and install that before you really play it much. Chessmaster consistently gets low marks from hardened chess players because it lacks the high end analysis tools of the Chessbase products and has pretty pathetic online play. I don't find either of those to be an issue since most people don't need or want those analysis tools (the Chessbase ones have a pretty high learning curve) and if you want to play online, seriously anyway, there are Internet sites dedicated to that purpose that will always be better (like Internet Chess Club, or Playchess.com). So, if you are interested in improving your chess skills this is a package that you cannot go wrong purchasing. If you are a chess professional with a desire to deeply evaluate scores of variations within a game to search for subtle nuances, then you already know this product isn't the right one for you and you don't need to write reviews that try to scare novices away from a product that is truly a great match for them.