In order to improve your chess game it will be better to analyze your own games and learning how you can create your own chess lessons. This may be the most important chess lessons: learning how to create your own chess material.

For the creation of this chess material we will need some tools and one of the tools will be a chess database. However ChessBase is probably something that isnt affordable for most of the readers of this blog. Therefor I will use the free ChessDB during the next lessons.

But do we need a database to study chess?
No, you probably need more than one database: The first database contains all the games you have played, the second database contains games of possible opponents, the third database is just a large database which can be used to check how other players are trying to solve specific positions, openings, endgames, … and the last (fourth) database can be used to store the generated lessons.

And we probably may add some databases dealing with specific openings or other interesting stuff. But even without all these databases ChessDB can be used to enter and save your own games, analyzing them by means of Crafty and/or Toga II or making use of the included endgame tablebases.
The ChessDB tutorial may be a good starting point for further reading.

Next chess lesson will be about some free alternatives for a large chess database.