"I use only 10% of ChessBase features..." — Anish Giri on Creating ChessMonitor

Anish Giri

Netherlands' No. 1

“I could never shape a platform in the way that I want…

Take ChessBase, for example. It’s a very big and complex piece of software with a lot of features. In terms of percentage, I use maybe only 10% of them. Obviously, if you have 90% of the features that you don’t use, if you remove them, there will be more space for other things.

And among the features I do use, there were a number of certain little things I wanted to be different, a lot of things I wished were simpler.

For example, I need to have the recent games that are in the Mega Database. It’s called Mega Database in ChessBase, but actually it’s called Ultra Database in ChessMonitor.

We renamed it to Ultra because Ultra sort of represents speed. Basically, the moment a game is over, it’s already in the base.

For example, when I finish my games in St. Louis, I come back to my room and I don’t need to input my game. I just find it inside my preparation tool under my own name. It’s already there.

There are many platforms with games. But I wanted them to always update automatically.

I also have certain ideas about the kind of opening content that I want to be integrated in a platform. And for this to work, I need my own platform as well. And I want to do it in my own kind of way.

There are other course websites that I worked for, like ChessBase and so on. And there were many things I liked about the software. But some things I wanted a little bit different.

And little by little, detail by detail, it became a very different kind of software.”