I have read of several people complaining that the program has various glitches, but I have not found that to be the case. I use it on an old laptop with Windows 8.1 and on a newer laptop using Windows 10 and have never had a problem on either one of them.
The program comes with a ton of engines which I don't need because none of them are stronger than the free Stockfish 15. The only caveat with Stockfish is that its evaluations are about twice as high as those of other programs and the lower evaluations of programs like Komodo seem more appropriate.
I'm not interested in Fritz 17's 3D boards with ray tracing, playing online or its training features, just doing a full analysis and publishing.
It turns out that Fritz 17's analysis returns a tremendous amount of information, some of which I could do without.
It inserts diagrams at what it considers to be appropriate places in the game. They are easily deleted by simply clicking on Text After Move and deleting the text that generates the diagram.
There are some other symbols and colored flags that appear at various points in the game. I have not bothered to find out their meaning, but there seems to be no way to delete them except by searching through the HTML code and deleting the code appearing in brackets that begins with a percent sign. But leaving them in the published games doesn't hurt anything, so the simplest thing to do is ignore them.
My initial problem with using Fritz 17 to publish games was the appearance...all the bells and whistles plus engine output appeared on the blog post, but it was much wider than my column so it bled into the column on the right hand side of my blog page. This was an easy fix...just change the column width when pasting the game into the blog.
There is another way to paste the game into the blog that automatically adjusts to the blog's column with, but all the bells and whistles are missing. Nevertheless, I like this layout the best. The only problem was finding documentation on how to do it.
It was not until I found this documentation that Fritz 17 became my program of choice for posting game in the blog.
Here's how to do it:
* Click on Direct Share
* Select Create a HTML File
* Assign the game a name
* In my case my default browser is Internet Explorer and it automatically opens and a pgn of the game appears.
* At this point right click anywhere on the page and select View Source. A new window opens with the HTML.
*Just copy and paste this into Blogger's HTML page.
In Blogger the game will appear like this:
Once I discovered how to paste the games into my blog using this method I changed my opinion of Fritz 17 and I now use it for all analysis and publishing.
Fritz 18 is out now and is available for download for about $90. I am not sure what's new, but I doubt that it's anything really worth while. If you can find Fritz 17 it should be cheaper.
The main point of this review is that I have found Fritz 17 to work well with my laptops and it is a excellent program for posting games in Blogger. It is also an excellent tool for analysis and I honestly do not know why some people have found it to have so many glitches.
