Maybe this site already does this and I haven't noticed, but there are some tournaments that are organized in such a way as to split their references on Chessgames.com to multiple threads.

I would like to request that such finished tournaments be reunited in a different fashion, or else to have links provided to each part so that the games are kept as one unit. That way the user doesn't have to hunt through the database for the rest of the games in the tournament. Here's the example:

1. What resources should I know about for research? I'm currently using FIDE's and ICCF's player lookups, Olimpbase, and sometimes just Google. I know there are other databases but they have errors just like we do, and I'd prefer something more reliable.

Here's what I figured out about this game: If you try to correct the game by playing 19.Qe3 instead of 19.Qd3 then the moves all seem to make sense all the way up to 24.Qxg6+ which presumably should be 24.hxg6. Moreover, it explains the mysterious sacrifice of the bishop on c4: White believed that prying the kingside open was worth the bishop.

The problem with this theory is that if you correct the game by making it read 19.Qe3 and 24.hxg6, then the result of 1/2-1/2 becomes a mystery. After 24.hxg6 Black is defenseless and might as well resign: e.g. 24...hxg6 25.Rh8+! mates.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041223...

<GKSz Polfa Grodzisk Mazowiecki (POL) v. SK Glasinac (BIH) 4-2

Acs, P. 2606 HUN v. SCG 2467 Jeremic, V. ½-½

Cyborowski, L. 2550 POL v. SCG 2434 Scekic, M. 1-0

Miton, K. 2546 POL v. SCG 2345 Benderac, S. 1-0

Grabarczyk, M. 2508 POL v. SCG 2191 Batinic, P. 0-1

Heberla, B. 2420 POL v. SCG 2168 Plakalovic, P. <<<1-0>>>

http://chess-results.com/tnr1356.as...

<1. What resources should I know about for research? I'm currently using FIDE's and ICCF's player lookups, Olimpbase, and sometimes just Google. I know there are other databases but they have errors just like we do, and I'd prefer something more reliable.>

Wikipedia can be useful, especially if it's properly sourced as these sources can in turn be very useful and can also provide leads to other useful sources.

A World Championships Index was compiled Weeks and Marks at http://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/wcc... This is useful for all the championship events, Candidates and Interzonals, but not so good for the zonals if you ever need to drill down that far.

http://www.ugra-chess.com/ provides info about the 2010 Olympiads as it hasn't been updated to Olimpbase yet.

Information about zonals: http://www3.sympatico.ca/g.giffen/z...

http://chess-results.com/ is reliable and widely used by official tournaments to display results, but only covers the last decade or so. You can search by player, year, tournament or country.

TWIC is also useful and extensive but needs a fair bit of work to mine the information on an ad hoc basis.

http://al20102007.narod.ru/ (Rusbase 1920-1994) is excellent for archived information about events in the Soviet Republics, and you'll find stuff there you won 't find anywhere else.

P.S. You mentioned you look at the FIDE player lookups. Hopefully that means you also use the link to all the FIDE registered tournaments played by that player under classical time controls since 2001.

<Stonehenge> Thanks. I almost assumed that Wim was an abbreviation for William, so I know it's best to be careful. ;)

<twinlark> Wow, thank you, that list is very helpful.

About the FIDE site, do you mean the "View Games of a Player online" link? I haven't been in the habit of looking at it because I didn't think it was complete. But like you said, even if it's not, it still can be useful.

<About the FIDE site, do you mean the "View Games of a Player online" link?>

No, it has interesting information and some PGNs but it's not very useful. I mean the "Click to view All previous periods" link. It's the entry to a treasure trove of information.

The FIDE database isn't especially user friendly, but it has an immense amount of information and has improved quite materially over the last few years. It's the single most valuable source I use for constructing bios, in conjunction with other sources.

<I have another research question. Where do you get full player birthdates? On FIDE all I find is the year.>

That is actually one of the hardest bits of data to find...you have to prospect around for them and find them in odd places, like their websites, or in player bios on official tournament sites, or national federation websites (eg: http://armenianchessplayers.blogspo...), or just use good old fashioned elbow grease on google.Speaking of which this may help: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=c.... And then there's stuff like this that matches dates to players rather than vice versa: http://maskeret.com/cgi-bin/today.cgi Also this one has been useful on occasions: http://www.echesspedia.com/

I'm planning to submit games from the 2nd National Chess Federation of the U.S.A. Congress, held at Bradley Beach in 1928. (I had to do something; there are no games available from the Western Championship/US Open for that year.)

Now, I think the PGN should start like this:

[Event: "2nd NCF Congress"]
[Site: "Bradley Beach, NJ"]

Now, this event is generally known (when known at all) as "Bradley Beach 1928". I didn't know it was the 2nd NCF Congress until recently, and I doubt that more tnan five or ten thousand of our members know that either.

However, all the search results screens display "Event" information rather than "Site". I'm afraid people will be looking for "Bradley Beach", and simply pass over "2nd NCF Congress".

We really liked this idea, so we made a utility that allows admins to do this on demand. It's called "womanizer". (Just a bad pun, we didn't mean anything by that.)

So we started off running it on a few women's olympiads. We found many mistakes where obvious women were labelled as men; the biographer just must have forgotten to hit the "F" flag. Great!

We also ran into odd things like this: Sochi 22nd Women's R (1966) -- clearly games like Polugaevsky vs Matulovic, 1966 should not label anybody as a female. Yet women are in the roster. Not sure what that is, but with that "R" at the end it's clear something there is mislabeled. Anyhow, it's finding oddities, which is good.

<It's the same conflict I often have at work: Do it "right" and depend on the programmers to make the display of information useful, or tweak the data to "fix" the display myself?> I say do it right and "hope that the programmers" address the problem.

For starters it's not the end of the world if somebody looking for Bradley Beach doesn't find it immediately because they don't recognize "2nd NCF Congress". At least we weren't wrong, we just weren't helpful. Perhaps also one day we might be able to squeeze the Site-tag into the game listings, so it looks something like <2nd NCF Congress, Bradley Beach> which would be just peachy. Or perhaps we'll solve the problem some other way.

I think I can solve a few from 1933. In May a qualifying tournament was held in New York to pick two players to join Marshall and Kashdan on the US team for the Folkstone Olympiad.

The crosstable from the June 1933 <Chess Review> looks something like this:

Fine x1111=0=111
Dake 0x1=111=101
Simonson 00x1=11=111
Denker 0=0x1=11011
Horowitz 00=0x==1111
Willman =00==x1=1=1
Levenstein 1000=0x1=10
Reinfeld ===00=0x==1
Beckhardt 000100==x10
Schwartz 01000=0=0x=
Hassialis 000000101=x

Denker vs Fine, 1933 is certainly from that event. I submitted a correction slip on that one because there was a minor problem with the game score.

Levenstein vs Fine, 1933 was also from that event.