Last Friday I wrote that the popular feature ‘run games against repertoire’ will be included already in CPT 4 after all (unlike I wrote in an earlier blog post). Well, since yesterday it is implemented.
What is this feature anyway?
It’s doing some magic, which becomes even more powerful now that CPT 4 has this new and comprehensive repertoire management system.
Let me explain it by asking a few questions:
- Do you like playing Blitz games online?
- Do you find yourself playing more blitz games than you actually should (instead of studying some openings or chess theory)?
- And then, especially if you play a row of games against the same opponent, you always come to certain positions where you just have the feeling you start to lose the game?
Well, welcome to ‘run games against repertoire’! This feature basically checks for each game you played where you or your opponent played the first move which is not covered by your repertoire. And as this feature is dedicated to all ‘lazy’ chess players who can’t resist the attraction of some quick blitz games: it’s implemented in a way which makes it too simple and appealing to not using it. Yes, I call myself part of this target group! 
Let's see how this works in practice:
In this game I played 10. Be2 which is not part of my original Alekhine repertoire. Actually, I was supposed to play 10. dxe5 (accordingly to my repertoire). Now, this is already pretty cool, because what I just did was loading a PGN file (once set you can forget about it and go straight to this module). Then, CPT parsed all games which contained with my nickname as white or black player. Shows them all in the list at the bottom and for each game I click it not only shows the move list, but also the novelty me or my opponent played which is highlighted.
How does this work? In the background CPT navigates through all (!) your openings and the very first move which is not covered by any opening is considered to be a novelity. Now, to get the whole idea please have a look at the next screenshot which makes clear why this feature is so powerful which you can see here:
Show Screenshot (tries to open in a new window)
You can see that CPT shows in the main window the corresponding opening (automatically, it was not opened before!), shows the critical position and marks with an arrow the novelity. It doesn't stop here. You can easily 'accept' (all) novelities. In this case all these moves will be imported to the corresponding opening and the position will be marked as 'Novelity'. This way you can easily navigate through all novelities later.
So, why is this for the lazy guys who can't resist the temptation of some quick blitz games? Because now you can at least easily (almost in real-time, if you set it like this it could be even in real-time) see where you or your opponent didn't play your repertoire move. If it was you, you can see what the correct move is. Otherwise you can decide whether you want to include the opponents move in your repertoire and research a proper reply. This way you still learn your openings. Not as efficient as with the training module, but as a good mix its a reasonable trade-off.
Let me know whether you ever used this feature in CPT 3.3 and what you think about it (even if you haven't heard about it before)!