Review ChessOK Aquarium 2020

 

     Last month I did a brief post advising readers that ChessOK Aquarium 2020 (download version) was on sale at half price for 19.98 Euros which is US $23.64.  As you are probably aware, for sometime I have been using my old Aquarium 2014 to post games. 

     The other day when I got a notice that this blog had made a few dollars I was able to download the 2020 version without any out of pocket expense.

     Aquarium 2020 is a great deal even at full price, but how does it compare to the 2014 version? 

     Honestly, I'm not interested in access to 60-plus improvement courses nor the 7.3 million game database. The improvement ship sailed a long time ago and my database is already pretty much up to date. Access to the Lomonosov 7-piece tablebases is nice though. 

     I don't really have the desire, or the need, to subject a position to exhaustive overnight analysis, so the IDeA analysis feature really isn't a selling point for me. Neither is playing against the engine something I want to do. 

     One nice feature is the improvement to Infinite Analysis. With other programs as soon as you shut the engine down or switch to another task the analysis disappears and you have to start over again. Aquarium 2020 stores your infinite analysis results so if you run into the same position, even in a different database and if it came up through a different move order, you can see that you have analyzed it before. You can also add a column with the infinite analysis tree to a tree configuration, so you can always see the evaluation of the different moves in the tree window. And, if you use multiple chess engines the analysis results and trees can be stored separately for each engine. All very nice features, but, again, I don't need all that information because not being a serious player, I'll probably never analyze the same position twice. 

     What I was curious about was seeing if there was anything different or better when it comes to posting games in the blog. Using the "HTML for export" function produces a very nice blog appearance except that squares with pieces on them are displayed as white squares and the code is often 90-100 pages long in 12 pt. font in Word which translates to thousands of lines in HTML in Blogger. That means I have to use the "iBook for HTML" command and the game will only be about 14 pages long and a whole lot less lines of code in Blogger! 

     When it comes to posting games in Blogger I'm afraid Aquarium 2020 is a bust. The problem is that when posting a game in iBook for HTML in Blogger you get something like this: 

 

     While you can still play through the game OK, the piece notation does not show up properly. I am not sure what the reason for this is, but looking at the HTML code it seems to have something to do with the way 2020 writes it and I am not computer savvy enough to figure out what the problem is.  

     What I did notice is that in the lines of code in the 2020 version "CA Chess" (a font) appears a lot whereas in the 2014 version it does not appear at all. I suspect this is the problem.

     The bottom line is that while Aquarium 2020 is an excellent program that does a lot of things, it does not meet my specific needs and now I have another unused chess program sitting on my old laptop.