Replaying a Game

The game viewer has a number of useful features for replaying a game of chess. The most important is the ability to follow the moves of the game on the chess board. There are a number of ways to do this. The first method is to use the replay buttons on the control panel that you can see just beneath the board in the following image.

Here is a larger picture of the control panel:

The buttons and their various functions are:

Go to Start of game

Go Back 5 moves

Go Back a move

Go Forward a move

Go Forward 5 moves

Go to End of game

Flip the board

Auto-replay the game

Step into variations. (Usually skipped unless the moves are clicked themselves)

Also note that you can use a number of the keys in your Numeric Keypad and Cursor Keypad to move around in the game as well.

One shorthand method for moving Forward a move, is to place your curor anywhere under the board that feels comfortable and simply click the right button of your mouse. (My favorite way!) Note also that you can also go to any particular position in the game simply by clicking on the move itself in the scrollable window to the right of the board.

As you play out the moves of the game, the moves themselves are hilighted in the scrollable game window and are shown under the board itself. This can be seen below. Also notice that some moves have a different color than the actual moves played in the game. These are variation moves and they can be clicked on and played out just like the actual game moves. (In the picture below the variation moves are green.) Sometimes you may see an unusual symbol following a move. For most of these chess symbols you will get an explaination of their meaning, in a tooltip, by hovering your mouse over them.

The game viewer sometimes uses tooltips for other extended game information. For example, if you hover over the opening name, provided at the top of the infobox, you'll often get an extended description of the opening.

You are not restricted to simply playing out the moves and variations that the annotator has supplied to you. If you would like to experiment with your own variations on the board, often referred to as Kibitzing, you can simply click on a piece to move and then click on the square you want to move it to. (For IE users, the piece itself with be picked up and follow your mouse to the new square.) As you make your own Kibitz moves, they will be shown under the board in long notation preceeded by the Kibitz symbol =>. You can take back a Kibitz move using your Back button [<]. In the picture below, the white bishop is being picked up and moved to b5.

Once you are finished Kibitzing, simply click on the Forward button to play the next move in the actual game. (Or use any of the many other navigation methods to pick the next move you want to play.)

Because the game viewer was designed to be an integral part of a chess magazine, there are a few features that support the idea of distributed analysis. Under the game table, you'll see a toolbar:

The first tool is the help page itself. The second is an email link to the Magazine Editor. You can use this to send an email message directly to the Editor. Beside this is the Auto-FEN tool. At any point in the game you can click on this and the game viewer will write a complete FEN of the current board position. (You can see this FEN string beside the Auto-FEN image itself.) You can copy / paste this FEN into your own chess software to get it to examine a position that you find interesting. The FEN and your analysis can then be sent along to the game's voluteer Editor-Analyst. If a game has a voluteer Editor-Analyst, an email link to him will be found at the bottom of the scrollable game window, as can be seen below.

The game viewer will fill in the subjext line of the email message for you with the details of the game. An example is:

Korchnoi V. - Kasparov G., Candidates Match2 1984