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katar chess

Basic Tablebases for SCID

11/16/2014

2 Comments

 
Tablebases are handy, but the required hard drive space makes them generally not worth the trouble, especially since they are available online from Shredder and ChessOK.

When I set up SCID, ages ago, I downloaded the 3- and 4-man tablebases on my hard drive.  The total size is less than 30 MB.  The 5-man tablebases weigh in at more than 7 GB -- far too cumbersome for non-professionals.

So I decided to install only the most important 5-man tablebases, particularly rook & pawn against rook.  The image to the right lists the tablebases for what I consider the most important/useful 5-man endgames (i.e., 3 pieces besides the 2 kings):
  • R+P vs. R
  • Q+P vs. Q
  • 2P vs. 1P
  • R+B vs. R
  • R+N vs. R
Picture
The above tablebase files total only 383 MB.  To find the source files, look HERE and scroll down to the "3-4-5 men bases" heading. After setting up the entire 3- and 4-man directories, ou will have to locate and download the particular 5-man ".emd" files above. Then you will have to point SCID to the directories where they are saved.  Before asking questions in the comments, please click/enlarge the screenshot images as I think these will clarify how this is supposed to work.  For example, if you experience errors, save the tablebase folders directly in the "C:/" drive as shown in the pictures (a long path or spaces in the path can cause problems).

This setup makes it a breeze to study theoretical endgames, for example, by transcribing Jesus de Villa's 100 Endgames You Must Know into a PGN file for further research and practice.  You can still resort to online tablebases to review an endgame beyond the parameters of the tablebases shown above.
2 Comments
BikingBrian link
11/26/2016 04:16:51 pm

Thanks for the info on setting up SCID with the tablebases. Rather than fuss with eMule, I instead downloaded the tablebases from here: http://tablebases.sesse.net/

I just got 100 Endgames You Must Know, would you happen to have the PGN file for that?

Reply
John T. Kennedy
1/10/2017 09:32:49 am

Interesting, but why now when terabyte drives are ubiquitous would you say 7GB tables are far to cumbersome?

Reply



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