Erik Roggenburg wrote:
On what do you base this assertion?
I'm not trying to be a jerk, I am just interested in how you arrived at your conclusions.
I got interested in this since what I study about my games, is the part when I get out of book. When I'm in book, I already am playing the best possible moves according to my experience and taste, so engines are useless there. The time spent on analyzing why I did lose a game later on would be better spent playing another game, or studding Chess books/articles etc. And analyzing improvements on the middle-game would be useless since I may not actually play these positions ever again.
So what was important to me was the out of book part of my games (What to do once the memorization part of the game ends), actually, understanding if the position out of book was good for me and what were the best things to try on. I wanted the best analysis tool out there so I bought Rybka, it's indeed the best tool once the game is going on, but when my opponent made odd moves early, Rybka was a disappointment.
She kept suggesting weird moves that I didn't like, such as Nc3 when there's a pawn on d4, or Bishop to d6 when there was a pawn on d7. I had to deep analyze the resulting positions, and the resulting positions from the move I played on the game, and finally Rybka agreed with me that the move I played was better than what she suggested, so I was back to the root position wondering if there was a better move than what I played, I even had to use the randomizer so Rybka chooses a second best move.
In the end, I lost most of the time analyzing useless variations that Rybka suggested, so I needed another engine that suggested the best moves right away in the opening. Then I read turbojuice1122's assertions about Ktulu and Loop being the best engines for opening analysis, so I obtained them and started to analyze with them.
Ktulu was very good when analyzing from the starting position of the game, so it was good for analyzing the soundness of my in-book moves, but that ended really fast as Loop takes over and refutes Ktulu variations.
Now, Loop was doing what I used to do, suggesting moves that after deep analysis proved to be better than Rybka's suggested moves (What you do is analyze the position for some time with one engine, and then with the other, and then the resulting positions from those with both engines, and then the resulting ones from them, and so on. Eventually one engine will agree with the other that its line was better, and in these cases Rybka was agreeing with Loop choices more than with her own choices), so I stopped using Rybka altogether for this kind of analysis.
Of course once you enter the middle game (And this is where the line blurs) Rybka becomes a monster and you should switch back from Loop to Rybka, but you can't imagine how much time I've saved by using Loop to analyze my out of book opening sequences.