Buyer Beware

Although it is not clear, the product sold on Steam is a limited version of the full software. The feature I particularly wanted was the Opening Repertoire management tools. I carefully checked the description of the software on Steam and it clearly lists this as being available:

"Methodical opening training ... The advantage: with some decisions and a few clicks you can set up a useable repertoire. This repertoire is online, i.e. it can be accessed immediately by any computer and on the web."

"Here are the highlights: Convenient one-click management of your opening repertoires"

Unfortunately, these tools have been removed from the Fritz software sold on Steam, indeed all of the Online functionality seems to be gone.

I wouldn't have a problem with this provided these restrictions were made clear in the product description. However, they are not, indeed the text seems to be lifted directly from the Chessbase website giving you the impression you will have access to the full package.

Don't waste your money. Steam version is missing functionality despite them charging full price. I spent a couple hours trying to figure out where the feature I bought the game for where, manual for the game on Steam is not for the steam version. Contacted steam support and they refused to refund because I'd "played" the game for 5 hours. Those 5 hours the game was sitting in the background while I tried to figure out where the missing features were, reading the 450 page manual and searching online. If you want the full experience including tactics and openings DON'T BUY ON STEAM. TBH will be the last time I buy a Steam game after dealing with Steam support.

I do not understand the negative reviews. Five years ago I spent $99 on Houdini 4. It never authenticated me so for 5 years I had to authenticate my ID before I could play. Having this program on STEAM is perfect!
I'm not a serious chess player so I have to acknowledge that there probably are some things that competitive, tournament-type, master-level players care about (like being able to look up what a guy did last week at a specific tournament), but the negative reviews are very misleading to the vast majority who would consider buying this.
1. The online functionality arguments. Again, I'm sure they are technically right, but I had no issue. I clicked from the main screen on the playchess.com option...within 10 seconds, i had "this week's video instruction by a grandmaster" and all kinds of online links...at the bottom of the screen (all within 10 secs), I was challenged to a game by 3 people, two from the US and one from Europe. Some links required a playchess subscription, which I guess the non-Steam version comes with 6 months...but I didn't miss it at all. And the 6 months would have gone by and it would have been nothing anyway so I don't really care about that. There's probably some cool training that only subscribers of playchess.com can get, but I don't want a 6 month teaser that only is trying to get me to make an annual subscription to some service that I don't truly care about (after the 6 months are up). It's just not a big deal for most people.
Having the game itself available on Steam (where I don't need a CD to authenticate, or worry about installing it while I'm out of town at a hotel...Steam takes care of all those issues...easily outweighs the loss of a 6 months subscription to some chess website that I would never have subscribed to anyway.
2. The database...one negative review said that it didn't have one. Nope, it has a huge database and it's easily accessible from the main Home page...just click the "Database" button and it goes to the main database that comes with the program...1.5 million games...up until like mid 2019... It has all the RELEVANT GAMES. Just for fun, I searched for "Kasparov"...man, I could spend a year just studying the amount of games that came back. People who fret over whether a database is 1 million or 5 million are kinda mentally ill. Their illness prevents them from truly understanding what 1 million is in terms of mathematics, especially in the context of "chess games played". It's a gargantuan number. One could easily spend the rest of his life just studying the database that comes with this program. Nuff said.
3. Another negative review went on and on about "repertoires" He said it was false advertising because it wasn't on his version. He's wrong. It's there. It's in the "openings" and narrative box (the one with like 5 tabs up above)...the tabs are so many that they cascade...if you click the right arrow to the end, you'll see the "repertoires" button...I clicked it and verified that it works. I actually don't understand "repertoires"--to me, they just look like opening trees, but they clearly are integrated because I saw another area that also linked "repertoires" so I don't know what the guy was so upset about...it's there and I verified that it works...to be overly kind, I'll assume there's some aspect that's missing--but, again, the vast majority of people will never even know what that missing something is. It has a full openings functionality, including the repertoires aspect...you will only be limited by the amount of time you dedicate to learning the game...not by the software...get it? (And, on a similar note, $200 basketball shoes won't make you able to slam a ball, either.)
4. Finally, as a life statement: chess is one of those games that can be absolutely exhilarating--like deep in the middle game when the board is perfectly balanced and you see something that just feels brilliant (whether it actually is brilliant is almost beside the point)...chess can give us great satisfaction intellectually. It's a great GAME. As a non-serious player, I have spent all I ever will...I bought 10 very good books (From general books like How to Reassess Your Chess to specific books on defense/offense/openings/endgames/middlegame strategy, etc...I hope that I can say someday that I read them all. So far I'm 1/2 way through Tarrasch's "The Game of Chess".... I know that I have to work through those books to become the player I want to someday be. I'm limited by my study time, not by what I own. I'll never buy another book...I have enough for what I need for life. I bought a nice classic staunton wooden chess set and its smaller set for a portable wooden chess set that I have for the road. I'll never buy another chess set in my life. So when I say this is worth buying, I'm talking about in life. You'll always have grandmaster analysis at your fingertips. You'll be able to input games and analyze them move-by-move. Or you can work through a book and set-up positions to make sure you really know the lessons...so much you can do...(I'm putting Tarrasch's The Game of Chess into a database where I can go through each lesson with all the variations, by simply using my arrow keys on the board--so nice. This software is great to have it on Steam. I'm not the kind of person to buy chess software twice. I would have put up with the Houdini 4 authentication issue for years (because it was just an inconvenience...it worked great once it was opened...but this Steam integration was too good to be true. It's a great bonus that it has this exciting new AI (deep learning) approach. They had better support all the versions they have on Steam in perpetuity else my review changes quickly.

Review for Fritz Chess 17 Steam Edition (english and french)

1. English
With Fritz 17, in addition to the Fritz 17 engine, you get a completely new chess engine that was created with the help of a neural network based on the AlphaZero approach. There are also new exciting functions for creating and practicing opening repertoire. Based on LCZero technology, a neural network was trained with Grand Master games for over a year. The developers named the result Fat Fritz, which, however, needs a very powerful NVidea graphics card to achieve the full game strength.

The engine also works on a processor of a commercially available personal computer, delivers very interesting results thanks to the neural network, but is actually up to two thousand times faster on the fast graphics card. Fritz 17 introduces repertoire management that is not based on entire variants but on trains.

The Fat Fritz Engine refers to the community project Leela Zero (Lc0). Fat Fritz definitely focuses on analysis. With Fritz 17 and Fat Fritz, Chessbase offers every chess player the opportunity to participate in the new analysis techniques with little effort.

Since the Fat Fritz program is based on a self-learning neural network, it is free of all templates. What promises success is preferred, regardless of what the theory thinks of it.
On the Computer Chess Ratings List of November 23, 2019, Fat Fritz took first place with the impressive Elo score of 3617 points.

High performance is already achieved with an RTX 2080 GPU. An RTX 2080 ti graphics card achieves an NPS performance of 37000.

There are three Fat Fritz engine versions available: the one controlled by the main processor ("CPU") and an "Open CL" and a "CUDA" version. The latter two require an extra graphics processor in the computer, and only with one of these is the Fat Fritz engine interesting (a largely undocumented tip is that many AMD graphics cards and even the graphics cores built into modern Intel processors support "Open CL", the performance of the integrated graphics cores is low but still much higher than that of the CPU): Fritz 17 is in any case the first commercial program to contain a modified version of the "Leela Zero" Chess Engine.

The GPU is not used to actually calculate. While the search is carried out on the CPU like any other engine, the GPU provides the assessments. But even with the best GPU, the search on the CPU only runs with two cores. Using more cores can even be counterproductive, because what is important is not how fast the CPU calculates, but how quickly the GPU can read the results of the neural networks.

The classic engines can use two, four, 32 or 128 cores. And each additional core leads to higher computing power. Fat Fritz and Leela do not use additional CPU cores.

The Engine Fat Fritz from the Fritz 17 program is the front runner in the CCRL Elo list and has a positive record against all tested programs.

Fat Fritz
against Leelenstein 11.1: +16 -11 =164
against Lc0 0.23.1 w42850: +17 -8 =167
against Stockfish 11 64-bit 4CPU: +19 -9 =72
against Allie 0.5 nn49921: +58 -3 =131
against Stoofvlees II a14: +51 -8 =121



2. French
Avec Fritz 17, en plus du moteur Fritz 17, vous obtenez un tout nouveau moteur d'échecs qui a été créé à l'aide d'un réseau neuronal basé sur l'approche AlphaZero. Il existe également de nouvelles fonctions passionnantes pour créer et pratiquer le répertoire d'ouverture. Basé sur la technologie LCZero, un réseau de neurones a été formé aux jeux Grand Master pendant plus d'un an. Les développeurs ont nommé le résultat Fat Fritz, qui, cependant, a besoin d'une carte graphique NVidea très puissante pour atteindre toute la puissance du jeu.

Le moteur fonctionne également sur un processeur d'un ordinateur personnel disponible dans le commerce, fournit des résultats très intéressants grâce au réseau neuronal, mais est en fait jusqu'à deux mille fois plus rapide sur la carte graphique rapide.

Fritz 17 introduit une gestion de répertoire qui n'est pas basée sur des variantes entières mais sur des trains.

Le Fat Fritz Engine fait référence au projet communautaire Leela Zero (Lc0). Fat Fritz se concentre définitivement sur l'analyse. Avec Fritz 17 et Fat Fritz, Chessbase offre à chaque joueur d'échecs la possibilité de participer aux nouvelles techniques d'analyse avec peu d'effort.

Le programme Fat Fritz étant basé sur un réseau neuronal auto-apprenant, il est libre de tous les modèles. Ce qui promet le succès est préféré, indépendamment de ce que la théorie en pense.

Sur la liste des classements des échecs informatiques du 23 novembre 2019, Fat Fritz a pris la première place avec l'impressionnant score Elo de 3617 points.Des performances élevées sont déjà atteintes avec un unité de traitement graphique RTX 2080. Une carte graphique RTX 2080 ti atteint une performance NPS de 37000.

Il existe trois versions de moteur Fat Fritz disponibles: celle contrôlée par le processeur principal ("unité centrale de traitement") et une version "Open CL" et une version "CUDA". Les deux derniers nécessitent un processeur graphique supplémentaire dans l'ordinateur, et le moteur Fat Fritz n'est intéressant qu'avec l'un d'entre eux (un conseil largement non documenté est que de nombreuses cartes graphiques AMD et même les cœurs graphiques intégrés dans les processeurs Intel modernes prennent en charge "Open CL", les performances des cœurs graphiques intégrés sont faibles mais toujours bien supérieures à celles du unité centrale de traitement): Fritz 17 est en tout cas le premier programme commercial qui contient une version modifiée du "Leela Zero" Chess Engine.

Le unité de traitement graphique n'est pas utilisé pour calculer réellement. Alors que la recherche est effectuée sur le unité centrale de traitement comme n'importe quel autre moteur, le unité de traitement graphique fournit les évaluations. Mais même avec le meilleur unité de traitement graphique, la recherche sur le unité centrale de traitement ne fonctionne qu'avec deux cœurs. Utiliser plus de cœurs peut même être contre-productif, car ce n'est pas la vitesse à laquelle le processeur calcule, mais la vitesse à laquelle le unité de traitement graphique peut lire les résultats des réseaux de neurones.
Les moteurs classiques peuvent utiliser deux, quatre, 32 ou 128 cœurs. Et chaque noyau supplémentaire conduit à une puissance de calcul plus élevée. Fat Fritz et Leela n'utilisent pas de cœurs unité centrale de traitement supplémentaires.

Le moteur Fat Fritz du programme Fritz 17 est le leader de la liste CCRL Elo et a un bilan positif contre tous les programmes testés.

Fat Fritz
contre Leelenstein 11.1: +16 -11 =164
contre Lc0 0.23.1 w42850: +17 -8 =167
contre Stockfish 11 64-bit 4CPU: +19 -9 =72
contre Allie 0.5 nn49921: +58 -3 =131
contre Stoofvlees II a14: +51 -8 =121

Which I had to refund since the Steam version has some serious flaws and devs don't answer any of the forum topics. Well, here's a well-earned downvote for you.

IMPORTANT things to note about Steam Edition:
1) Doesn't work if Steam is in offline mode. At all. That's why I've got a refund.
2) The online feature is limited compared to the non-Steam version. All online features are removed.!..

I'm using it since version 14, it was always the best choice when you needed the desktop, offline-capable chess program.
What makes it good for me is its rich functionality. To name a few:
* You can add any chess AI engine you want, and test it, against other engines, offline or online with others, earning ELO by optimizing your code(if you're a developer) and the rest of your tech stack.
* Engine Cloud and Engine donation: if you have some noticeable CPU power on your home server, you can rent it as an engine. Or if you just have some spare computation power, you can donate it for "points".
* Real-time evaluation of your moves. The "engine" can give you bits of advice. But not useless ones like "best moves", but commenting about the particular pieces and places on the board, or when you're going to make a very bad move.
* 2D board designs look very clean on FullHD display, and very customizable.

Disadvantages:
* Some say that interface is clunky, and there are bugs. But I'd say the interface is fine, it's a software, after all. And for bugs - I never had any major troubles.
* Online feature isn't the strongest part of it.

This is a stripped down version down to being barely usable.

Good: It's a strong chess engine that adapts to play and gives you opportunities.

Bad: If you hope to play a game and then get fritz to analyze the game and help you improve, forget it. Unless you want to restart the game in a dedicated analyze mode, it wont help you.

The whole analysis tab is simply reoved from the user interface. You can try to reach bits and pieces of the analysis by right click menus here and there that they forgot to remove. You can save the game and reload it as a historical game to be analyzed, but it's blatantly clear that they want to penalize you for having bought the cheaper steam version.

Archaic program with an UI from before 2010

I am a novice chess player who likes to toy with chess computers, hold databases and unleash analyses on my played games. Fritz 17 doesn't do this better than Chessmaster 9000 did fifteen years before it. I barely see any improvement over it, so this must be all about the power of the Fritz computer, and that is not enough for me. There is no integration with any chess site to automatically upload your games, and the one site that is included doesn't work via the Steam edition.

An absolete program.

DO NOT BUY THIS!!!

THE DESCRIPTION, VIDEOS, AND SCREENSHOTS ARE DIFFERENT THAN WHAT YOU GET.
WHOLE FEATURES ARE MISSING.
DO NOT PURCHASE THIS IF YOU WERE EXPECTING A WORKING VERSION OF FRITZ 17.

UPDATED
Changed to positive since, I have to admit, slowly finding out content is there, just hidden behind a really unclear and buggy - for me - interface!
First I have to click "NO" on every prompt it pops up when I launch some of the modules or menus items (at least this is what's happening on my system...), then it seems, so far, everything runs, their website connection too - playchess - only thing you are logged in as guest with sort of limited privilege, which is fair, tbh.
The Easy Game is what actually it says...easy with limited functionality...Then, if you want to access the full features, you can only via launching a game from the database or running the classic menu and then working from there ( as pointed out by Knusperzwieback in a reply to my review!)


EDITED
Okay, after a few tries, it seems that, when prompted by the system to allow to run the DLL related to the module, if you click NO, oddily the module starts: so far I've been able to run the Analyze during a game and the "enter & Analyze" a previously played game from the main interface...gonna give some more tries to see what it works and what it doesn't
-----------------------------------------

ORIGINAL
Beware, as many already stated, a stripped version of the software, which would be okay, since the price is lower than that of their website for the full program, BUT they just DON'T tell you on the product's description!
I do hope they just did it due too a poorly managed and hastly adaptation of the software to be sold and run through Steam, but it's been stripped of all the online tools; probably they just copied the description from their website and pasted here and the manual too refers to the full version.
I can live without the hassle of having to tackle with their online access, which I guess, since due to how they managed this thing, must be a real pain in XXX, but since they just carelessness stripped the software from the online part,you missing here some usefull tools.
You realize how they poorly managed this version, trying to launch from the main interface some of the tools that should be here but they aren't: you got error messages for DLL missing, so they just simply took off many modules.

What you get: FRITZ 17 engine, the 2020 games database (which however can be easily found on the web), standard opening books, and all the standard tools to play a plain game (clocks, notation window, history of live played moves related to the moves you are playing and such)

What you DON'T get: all the content related to their webiste part - FAT FRITZ, the neural engine, the managing of your own opening repertoires, any training tool, final game analyzing, drills and everything related to that engine, and of course all the online part: matches and drills.

To make it short, this is just a nice but simple chess game with a good engine, but lacking all the content that can assist you to train and improve your game other than playing matches and learn by yourself without any AI help.

Limited version