The Israeli chess program Junior 10, written by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky, has for many years now belonged to the best in the world. At the 14th World Computer Chess Championship, which was held as a side event of the Chess Olympiad in Turin, Junior scored 9/11 to take the title (second was Shredder with 8.5/11, third Rajlich with the same score). In the very strong field at this event Junior remained unbeaten and triumphed at the end by beating the reigning world champion Shredder [full ChessBase report].

The winning team in action in Turin: Amir Ban (left) and Shay Bushinsky (right)

A secret of this success is the implementation of chess knowledge, which has been continuously enhanced and improved by the programmers for many years. The greatest strength of Junior lies in its understanding of compensation. This was a remarkable quality already in earlier version, and led to the famous bishop sacrifice on h2 in a match against Garry Kasparov. and now has been honed to perfection in Version 10.

Junior's famous bishop sacrifice in a tournament game against Garry Kasparov

For chess programs the comprehensive of concepts like compensation translates into a view beyond the horizon. It also makes the new computer world champion a particularly attractive chess partner, not only in direct training bouts, but also for chess study and analysis, especially of sacrifices or generally sharp, dynamic positions.

Junior 10 is now available. It provides you with twelve months of free access to the Playchess.com server. You also get the latest openings book which is continually enhanced and improved by GM Boris Alterman, a member of the Junior team. Deep Junior 10 is a special version that runs on multi-processor systems, making it much faster than the single-processor Junior 10.