REBEL 11.0 review

by Jim Walker

Let me start by giving you the bottom line first.  The new Rebel 11 CD is the best buy on the market.  You can't go wrong with this CD at double the current price.

What do you get with this package?  A leaner & meaner Rebel Century 3.0 with an 800,000 game database.  A computer Analysis Tool or CAT for short which continues to expand as Rebel plays games and learns.  The Big EOC  chess tree of 20 million positions.  Rebel has an opening book of over 46,000 variations consisting of 2.6 million positions. 

The features of Rebel Century seem endless.  It comes with several "Personalities" which makes Rebel try to emulate the style of such notables as Karpov, Tal, Kasparov and Fischer.  You can also create your own personality to play as daring or as defensive as you like.  It is possible to play any of the personalities against each other automatically.  For people who owned the previous Century I'm beginning to bore you with what you already know.  

But it gets better! 

You get Chess Tiger 13.  An improved version of Chess Tiger 12 which temporarily lead the SSDF rating list when introduced last year.  Then you also get Gambit Tiger.  The attacking monster just recently unleashed by Christophe Theron which  won the French Computer Chess title and then the Dutch open 2000 Computer Chess tournament in October. 

My personal test running several hundred auto232 games between both Tigers and the current leader of the SSDF rating list shows the "Tigers" superior at blitz.    That's not all.  Also included in the package is Chesspartner 5.   A windows  GUI with it's own acompanying Engine.  ChessPartner 5 marks the coming of age of this windows GUI.  It allow you to  run the two "Tigers" on the internet chess servers.  ChessPartner will also run your favorite winboard engines such as Crafty which runs very smoothly while using it's own opening book and tablebases.

One of my favorite features is that you can copy a "FEN" position with "Ctrl C" and then with "Ctrl V" the position is immediately set up in the GUI for either Tiger or Rebel Century 2.0 to analyze.  You can also have both engines analyzing at the same time.

The Rebel 11 CD package is a "must" buy for anyone planning to purchase a new chess program. 

The Rebel organization is very friendly and responsive to the customers needs.  They are constantly improving their product and are very willing listeners to customer problems or suggestions.  I recommend this package without reservation.