Arena is a complete chess environment. It comes with different features such as Elo calculation, analysis of entire games, sparring, chess 960, creating abk opening books and much more, all free. Windows and Linux.

For a person who wants to approach the world of chess this is all what he/she needs, no super-strong engines or top quality books and databases.

In order to get this beautiful software you have to go on their website and download it from there, you can in a second time download an UCI compliant chess engine like Stockfish and use it with this interface. Arena also works with PGN databases.

Link: Arena homepage.

SCID (Shane's Chess Information Database) is a graphical interface to work on chess on many aspects. Personally I find it an oblige for two great functions: Tools->Book tuning (for bin books) and the ability to filtrate the pgn databases created by Chessbase software from all the comments, that is mandatory to be able to convert these databases into bin books with Polyglot Tolerant.

SCID books tuning:

SCID pgn archives filtering:

Before:

After:

The version I'm offering here is an enhanced one with the following tweaks:

• - added Cfish chess engine for analysis
• - added new >= 2600 Elo players database
• - added the Perfect 2021 opening book (https://sites.google.com/site/computerschess/perfect-2021-books)

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