PGN ChessBook

Whether it's played on an old-fashioned board or on a computer, chess is as popular as ever. Nowadays, you can take advantage of specialized software to improve your skill, either by analyzing famous matches or finding errors in your own games.

PGN ChessBook is an open-source program that serves multiple purposes. It allows you to view PGN files that store chess games, save your own matches in a database, analyze them using the Stockfish 8 engine, find ideal moves, and more.

The PGN format was designed for recording every move in a chess game, along with comments, and it is supported by almost every chess-related application. Pretty much every famous chess match can be found online in this format should you wish to analyze it.

A single file contains a large number of chess matches. You can run them play-by-play to understand how they were won, and there are multiple filters you can use to find the right game. Detailed statistics can also be generated.

Whether you've started a game from scratch, or you've loaded an existing one, you can have the application use the Stockfish 8 chess engine to determine what the best move would be in any situation.

You can run a blunder check to find moves that weren't optimal and view better alternatives. Blunders are given a rating based on how serious they are, and you are shown how much better the alternative is.

The user interface doesn't exactly strike us as modern, but it is very simple to navigate even as a new user. The most important functions are easily available in the toolbar, and you can even customize the board to a certain extent.

In short, you can't really go wrong with PGN ChessBook if you're looking for a way to analyze chess games and work with PGN files. It does everything you need, and it's very easy to use, though the UI could use an upgrade.