Training with Fritz: Forcing a Tabiya

One of the training things I have been wanting to do is set up Fritz to play specific openings. It is not too hard.

1. Open up your large database and filter on a tabiya (key position from an opening you want to play against Fritz). I like to pull The Week In Chess database have on ChessDB and transfer that over, but the one that comes with Fritz is fine. If you have Chessbase and have kept it updated, then that is good, too. I used the position below from the NeoGrunfeld
2. Save the games from the filtered position as a new database. I think the best way to do this is select all the games, then copy, open a new database and paste.
3. Open Fritz, and create a new opening book (Menu->New->Openings Book) and name it to match.  I used NeoGrunfeld. Now the current opening book in Fritz is blank and has a name.
4. Now we have Fritz improve the blank opening book by learning from the database.with the Openings Book from the Openings Book pulldown under Analysis. Select the Import Games option and select the database you created with the filtered games. The length in the dialog is the number of ply (half-moves). I suggest that you do add too many ply. Your opponents will not play the book moves, and your sparring against Fritz should be about learning the ideas/tactics of your opening, and not memorizing moves. (especially if you have the book pane open!) You can repeat Import Games

With this special opening book, Fritz will follow the many transpositions to this position and then play from there.

To return to the full opening book, just open the Fritz12.ctg opening book file (Menu->Open->Openings Book)

After figuring most of it out, I found this video: Database into Fritz opening book which explains a perhaps clearer way to do this.