chess engines, for analysis of the game

Question

Up till now I am using Rybka for analysis of my games.

What other chess engines have people used and how good have you found them. Please I am not interested in the list of chess engines with their websites, or just the name of the engine if you have heard about it a few words, I want opinion of a person who has used the engine for a long time and found it nice and helpful.

What I am looking for is to find a way to calculate the accuracy of the game:

• how often the person was doing really good moves
• how often the advantage in the game was changing

Previously I saw such options in Rybka, but in my current version Rybka v4 I can not see this

Thanks Ed Dean for pointing direction.

Answer 1

I use Stockfish, and have found it useful for analysis largely because of its multipv support (I switched from Crafty a couple of years ago), and it being free. I feel it lacks EGTB support, so it's not up to par with Rybka in that respect, but haven't felt willing to shell out the money for Rybka yet, just for that feature. It sounds like it also might do a better job of reporting forced draws, but I haven't confirmed that myself.

I agree with Ed, you should give guidance on what you want to hear in your answers. Rybka is a fine analysis engine.

Answer 2

Here's an obligatory post about the benefits of Rybka...

The biggest advantage to Rybka (especially Rybka 4) is that it has a very good positional understanding. It is capable of giving a fairly accurate assessment of the initiative and king safety, subject to the same limitations of all other chess engines.

Generally speaking, I find that Rybka is slightly slower tactically than Houdini or Stockfish, but that the positional "understanding" more than makes up for this weakness. Granted, Rybka and I work well together and that's a personal preference, but I have tried all of the major engines in some tricky positions and Rybka always seems to make me more productive.