Using Let’s Check in Fritz

2026-06-05T07:34:45.823-04:00

Recently I did something I promised myself I would never do again...I entered a correspondence tournament. It has turned out to be more labor intensive than anticipated especially since two games are against ICCF Senior IMs.

The main reason for entering the tournament was my desire to test the new Swordfish engine, a Stockfish derivative that is supposed to be useful for analyzing sharp positions in which Stockfish could overlook some tactics.

The procedure was to use Swordfish and use the highly rated Reckless engine as a kibitzer. When the two engines agreed on a move it was played. If they did not agree, which was not often, then Stockfish broke the tie. The problem was that after 15 moves or so it began to feel like my positions were almost imperceptibly slipping into inferiority and so the decision was made to switch the main engine to Stock fish with Reckless as the kibitzer.

Although I have been using Fritz since the days of Ftitz 12 (2009) there is a feature I never bothered with until this tournament, the Let’s Check feature and I was curious to see if it was of any practical value, or was it just a bell, or maybe a whistle.

Let's Check has been around a long time and it is a cloud-based community analysis feature in ChessBase's software. It functions as a massive, continuously updated database of engine analysis. Reviewer Steve Lopez does an excellent job explaining it on THIS ancient YouTube video.

Take a look at the following position after 7...Nc5.

Below are the results of previously done analysis on this position.. Note that the top line is the output by Stockfish 18 that was running in my program. While all three engines agree that white should play 9.Qc6+, Stockfish’s analysis is much deeper and its evaluation is that the position is equal rather than white having a Pawn-plus advantage.

This feature could actually be quite helpful because it saves a great deal of analysis time. But…and this is a BIG but, how long was the time used for the analysis? If the analysis was done at only a few seconds per move, it’s really not that valuable.

My preference is to use infinite and to analyze using two of the four cores on my old laptop. In some critical positions I have left the engine running while I did something else. That is likely to be safer than trusting the analysis in Let’s Check.

Tartajubow On Chess II

Using Let’s Check in Fritz