Author: Mark R. Anderson
Date: 11:00:25 05/27/04
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I agree with Fernando that the manufacturers are totally sucking any profit they can out of the market by offering inferior machines. When I have looked at the market, many of today's dedicated units are *weaker* than those offered 10 or 20 years ago! How can this be? Easy ... they are being just plain CHEAP, and expect to pawn off this crap on us. Having said that, I also agree with ERIQ, but with one caveat. Like you guys, I have very powerful software, like Shredder, Fritz and Hiarcs, and they just beat the #&#$^!!# out of me on my fast PC. Here I am, thinking I'm a good player, and they prove OTHERWISE! No surprise, I'm not Kasparov (and they almost are!). So, it's just plain fun to sometimes beat the crap out of these weak units ... seems like a small measure of revenge, or perhaps some balm for our ego. Ha ha. It's especially fun for me on the subway, going to or from work, when I don't want to think "heavily." Here's the caveat ... I would like to see some BETTER handheld units, and then I can "dummy" them down various ways, and get a reasonable standard of play with a decent response time (you have to wait and wait and wait for the weakies to play halfway good). Also, these weak units are just a *joke* in an endgame, I'm sure you've noticed, and they don't play positional chess like their "big brothers" do. So, it seems like we have a choice .... get a cheap 1200 elo unit that we beat the crap out of and which really has a poor game (teaching us bad habits?), or spend lots of $$$ and get a really strong (perhaps too strong) unit like PF2 on a fast pocket PC. Thankfully, I can use Hiarcs, Fritz, etc, to dummy them down, and get reasonable and fairly "human-like" play, but I don't want to always be sitting at my PC! So, where are you, manufacturers? These weak units are a JOKE .... you should be ashamed! How about a unit in the middle? I love Chess Tiger, both for my PC and my Palm, but on the Palm, the "trainer" levels play *MUCH* too weak (Here, have my knight! Is it yummy? Here's my bishop too! Want my queen?). The normal blitz levels play almost 2300 on my overclocked unit. Is there no in-between? I hope the uncoming Hiarcs for Palm has solved this problem! I don't want to have to choose between a 1200 player who will put up no resistance or a 2300 master who will almost always beat me when I make small errors. How about 1800? 1900? 2000? etc ...) I think THAT is what the customers want ... a unit with a variety of levels, not just really weak or really strong. Most of us are neither of those. Mark
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