Best 5 free Chess Software

What about stockfish? Is it bad?

My favorite so far is PGN ChessBook at https://pgnchessbook.org

I like the variations layout and PDF export. I use it most days because it comes with Stockfish out of the box

This one a nice simple GUI and Stockfish integrated out of the box. 

https://pgnchessbook.org/

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pgn-chessbook/

It has the best print to PDF doc variations layout I found, which was what I needed.

Best chess apps for Android

1. Droidfish - for analysing your game and learning openings. Capable of accessing huge opening book in ctg format.

2. SCID on the GO - database program. Capable of filtering millions of games. 

3. Kingbase - 2.2M games played from 1990.01.01  - 2018.12.30 by players >= 2000

I wrote some free chess programs for Windows users:  https://sites.google.com/site/fredm/

Amazing collection of chess games for Scid. Thank you fredm73.

i tried to use lucas chess but it is counterintuitive and i could never get it to do what i wanted, for example, load initial positions.  it was so frustrating - the user interface - that i finally uninstalled it from my system.  that's why i'm here looking for a replacement.  i purchased a program a while ago called 'chessmaster', and still have the cd for it, and that's what i'll end up installing if there isn't anything else.  i tried to use pgn chessbook, but i have a win 7 pc.  it has a ryzen 2700 processor, 16gb memory, and ssd, so it will run any of them, except for the the ones that require win 10

i have chess titans also (win 7), and it's a great program, but you can not load initial positions.  it's just a barebones engine

i also gave up on lucas chess.  the user interface is just horrible

i second that - stay away from ubisoft

another member wrote: "It's often surprisingly difficult to get a chess program to let you play black"

this is one of the reason i uninstalled lucas chess.  for the others read my posts wrt lucas chess.  now i've downloaded chessx, and am facing the same problem.   arrrrrrhhhhhhh

does anyone know how to get the engine to play white ?

With Lucas Chess, you need to be a bit of an experimenter and detective. If you don't know what a button does, just click on it to find out. :-)

I haven't used Lucas Chess in a good while, but I'm sure there's a setting for having the computer play White. With Arena, you just click on "Move Now", and the engine will play as White. Piece of cake...

It is easy to play black against the computer in Lucas chess.  No issue.

Loading an initial position is easy if you have the pgn.  One way to do it is to set it up here on chess.com and then copy and paste the pgn.  I'm pretty sure there is a way to do it manually as well but I haven't done it in a long time.

I agree that instructions are horrible or non-existent for how to use it.  But it can do a lot of you have the patience to fiddle with it.

I what I don't like is that it does not play chess 960.

thank you forked, escher for your replies

i did discover the "play now" command on chessx, but that doesn't make any sense

(rhetorical question) they have a button to flip the table.  why can't they just make a button to switch sides ?  it doesn't make sense to want to flip the table and not switch sides

The are free learning materials on chessable.com.
Chess King app offers free samples for every title in their library. Try before you buy.

thanks mate

Thank you so much!

where is chessbase ?

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