When I first tried Rybka 3 with Aquarium I was instantly impressed with the speed and layout of the application when it comes to a variety of chess-related tasks. Rybka 3 Aquarium is a revolutionary chess analysis and database tool, and it utilizes the world’s strongest chess playing engine, Rybka 3 (depending on which version of Aquarium you get). The Rybka 3 chess engine continues to dominate the chess world, winning computer chess competitions handidly still in 2009.
Aquarium offers plenty of advanced analysis functions, game commenting, position searching, powerful chess trees, playing, database functionality and much more. One of the cutting edge aspects of Aquarium with Rybka 3 is the Interactive Deep Analysis feature. IDeA will help you examine a position and the program will create a tree of variations for you.
The software will continue to build this tree for as long as you want it, and uses the power of the Rybka 3 engine to do so. This is a very important feature, because as many of you probably know, once you are out of "book" when analyzing a game, engines have only historically shown a few moves instead of providing a tree for you to consider.
Speaking of trees, Aquarium with Rybka 3 has chess trees that function very fast, and let you flip between opening books during analysis very quickly. The program also has support for Chessbase/Frit opening books, and will also allow you to import the best variations into your games from the press of a button for future analysis.
When it comes to personal game analysis, the program shines once again. I use it to do a vartiety of tasks, such as checking moves in comparison to book lines, analyzing the strength of various positions, and looking for improvements in my play. Aquarium with Rybka 3 also has many annotation features such as top-notch board graphics, symbols, commentary (verbal and written) and more.
If there is one thing I would like to see improved with Aquarium is the database management. While it does support a variety of databases, and has lightning quick opening and searching, it doesn't have a lot of sort options or straightforward ways to remove individual games from the database. From what I understand this is on the radar for improvements for the next generation of Aquarium, and by itself isn't something that detracted from the overall power and speed of the program.
Overall I have been very impressed with Aquarium with Rybka 3. In addition to the all the features I just listed above, there is also active support forums where the developers themselves answer questions and provide news on future patches. To date I have not seen this level of support in a chess software project, so that's a big plus in my opinion.
There are several different versions of Aquarium. I personally use Deep Aquarium with Rybka 3, which is the most poweful, but there are other packages that you might be interested in as well. Here is a breakdown of the different offerings that ChessOK has provided for this powerful chess program:
ChessOK Aquarium Basic*
ChessOK Aquarium Standard*
Rybka 3 Aquarium*
Deep Rybka 3 Aquarium*
Chess engine included
Rybka 2.2n21
Rybka 2.3.2a2
Rybka 33
Deep (multi-processor) Rybka 33
Engine ELO rating4
3000
3066
3155
32175
Chess960 (Fischer)
supported
supported
included
included
Databases, games
6,000
3,700,000
3,700,000
3,700,000
Chess tree, positions
100,000
30,000,000
30,000,000
30,000,000
Price
from €19.9 / $25
from €34 / $40
from €45 / $59
from €79 / $109
Aquarium with Rybka 3 Video Review
If you have any comments or questions about this software please visit the official_support_forums. For questions about the review or my particular use of Aquarium, feel free to email me directly.
