[Event "ch-Commonwealth RSA-Open"]
[Site "Ekurhuleni RSA"]
[Date "2011.07.01"]
[Round "9"]
[White "Jones,G"]
[Black "Laxman,R"]
[Result "*"]
[WhiteElo "2596"]
[BlackElo "2446"]
[EventDate "2011.06.25"]
[ECO "C42"]

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nxe5 d6 4. Nf3 Nxe4 5. Nc3 Nxc3 6. dxc3 Be7 7. Be3 Nc6 8. Qd2 Be6 9. O-O-O Qd7 10. Kb1 a6 11. h4 h6 12. Nd4 Nxd4 13. Bxd4 Rg8 14. c4 c5 15. Be3 O-O-O 16. g3 d5 17. cxd5 Qxd5 18. Qxd5 Bxd5 19. Bh3+ Kc7 20. Rhe1 Rge8 21. Bf4+ Kc6 22. Rxd5 Kxd5 23. Bg2+ Kc4 24. Bf1+ Kd5 25. Bg2+ Kc4 26. Bxb7 Kb5 27. Bc7 Bf6 28. a4+ Kb4 29. Be4 Rd2 30. f3 Re6 31. Bf4 Rg2 32. Rd1 g5 33. hxg5 hxg5 34. Bd6 Be5 35. Bf8 Re8 36. Bd6 Bxd6 37. Rxd6 Re6 38. Rd5 Rxg3 39. c3+ Kxa4 40. Rxc5 Rxe4 41. fxe4 Kb3 42. Kc1 Rg2 43. Kd1 Kxb2 44. e5 Rf2 45. e6 fxe6 46. Ke1 *

Here is a much broader query. At present, if a match between two players is accessed via one of their player pages (rather than the special pages for world championship matches etc) there is no easy way to tell which game is which. They are rarely entered in order, and the position of a game in the overall match may only be available in the 'round' field - which can only be seen by checking the game.

Some matches give the game number in brackets after the players' names or the venue/location, so that it appears in the game list as, say, Moscow (9) 1970.

Would it be possible to make this practice more general? Or to make it easier to find the nth game of a match in some other way?

I'd just like to remind the administrators of the staggering amount of research and work that <Benzol, suenteus po, Phony Benoni>, and more recently <Crawfb5> have put in to collecting not only the games- proper scores, rounds, and dates- but also priceless, and reliably researched, biographical information about each historical tournament, information they put in the introductions to the tournament collections.

There are literally hundreds of these important collections already extant at this site.

It represents thousands upon thousands of man hours of work- a gift to this website.

I'd estimate the cash value of their contribution to be in the six figures.

I think they have a moral proprietary interest in the work that they have completed already on the Historical Tournament project.

They also dug up and uploaded a huge percentage of those games to this database.

Gifts to this database- never asking for anything.

And, more important- much, much more important than this or any other particular website or database- a gift to chess history.

Real chess history. You know, the kind with actual facts that you can't find anywhere else.

I recommend to the administration to rely heavily on these Historical games researchers, collectors, and history writers in any move to make the Historical Tournaments "official Cg.com" pages.

This could be a great move- we could post kibbutzes on the Historical Tournaments then-

I'm all for it. But ONLY if the proper authorities- and by that I don't mean the owners of this website, I mean the people with actual chess history credentials, and a massive body of completed work on the Historical Tournaments- are HEAVILY involved in EVERY SINGLE STAGE OF THIS PROCESS.

I have to admit- as a watcher, a fellow member who makes use of their research on a daily basis for her own work- that I have at times been pained to see their reminders in this forum- and there have been much fewer of them than there could have been- of their uploads being "stuck in the pipeline."

Administrators- please be careful what you do- take care not to step on the toes of the people whose work forms the backbone of so much of the historical research value of this website.

Really- all I'm saying is this:

Be sure to look at their work. Do not ignore what they have done.

And, above all, involve them as true partners in the exciting prospect of turning their collections into pages we can put kibbutzes on, post related photos and links- it could be really great.

I'm sure it will be.

I'm sure you will do the right thing here.

Bear in mind I have no personal stake in this- I don't own the website, and I didn't do any of their work.

But involving them- heavily- in this change over is absolutely critical.

I'd also like to see some official acknowledgement of the titanic amount of free work they have given you in years of service.

Something like a public "thank you."

<Does this mean that the tournament collections that exist at present will become redundant?> They may become redundant in the sense that people will be able to go to other pages on the site to get the same information, but understand that these tournament collections are integral to the upcoming plans. In fact, I imagine certain users to be administrators of certain tournaments, in the sense that it will be their game collections that supply us with the tournament information.

Just for example: Suppose one day we may want to make a page for the St. Louis tournament of 1904. We'll then turn to <crawfb5> and say "Is your Game Collection: St. Louis 1904 complete and accurate?" And he will probably say "Yes!" and then we're cooking with gas. The software will take data out of his collection to use for the new tournament page. Then suppose there is a game from round 9 that was considered lost to history, but he finds it in an old chess magazine. He can submit it, then add it to his collection, and voila, the tournament page is updated.

Only by chopping this project up into bite-sized chunks can we possibly make significant progress. It's going to take a lot of people to make it happen.

[Event "ch-Commonwealth RSA-Open"]
[Site "Ekurhuleni RSA"]
[Date "2011.06.24"]
[Round "9.1"]
[White "Jones,G"]
[Black "Laxman,R"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[WhiteTitle "GM"]
[BlackTitle "GM"]
[WhiteElo "2596"]
[BlackElo "2446"]
[ECO "C42"]
[Opening "Petrov"]
[Variation "Nimzovich attack"]
[WhiteFideId "409561"]
[BlackFideId "5005361"]
[EventDate "2011.06.25"]

1. Each game has a field called YEAR (a small 4 digit integer) and another field called DATE, the full blown date with month and day and year. (This redundancy is done for efficiency purposes--we can improve the time it takes to do a query by having the extra field.) So a game may have a DATE of 2011-07-19 and a YEAR of 2011.

2. The DATE fields uses MySQL's powerful ability to store partial information, e.g. it's permissible to have dates of 2011-00-00 or 2011-07-00, meaning "2011" and "July of 2011" respectively.

3. It is impossible for the DATE and YEAR fields above to get out of synch with each other, e.g. a game with a YEAR of 1932 and a DATE of 1933-01-05. That would be disastrous if it happened, but don't worry, it can't.

4. For 95% or more of the games in the database, the DATE does not in fact have any month or day information. Just for example, Larsen vs Spassky, 1970 has a YEAR of "1970" and a DATE of "1970-00-00".

5. The "round" data is not used for anything at all in our database. It's not a field in the Games table, it's just some scribbling in the PGN.

6. When you get a list of games anything (a search, the opening explorer, a player page, a tournament, an ECO page, whatever) you will see them in DATE order. If you see a number of games that all have the same DATE you will see them in what MySQL calls "no particular order", or what I call "garbage order".

7. The entire reason why search results so often come in garbage order is simply that the database doesn't have the exact dates. If it did, then tournaments would naturally cluster together. If we only had DATE data, the only problem left over would be events like Melody Amber where multiple rounds take place in the same day. At that point we could consider finally making a column called ROUND.

♖

(I apologize for my liberal use of all-caps above; I need to differentiate between column names and normal words.)

Having said all of that, we have some ideas for adding dates to games in both manual and automatic ways. We started paying careful attention to dates with the History of the World Chess Championship, which, as you noted, shows up in perfect chronological order.

As you point out, <Some matches give the game number in brackets after the players' names or the venue/location, so that it appears in the game list as, say, Moscow (9) 1970.> What an abuse of PGN, stuffing data into fields ad hoc. Still, such bad practices often provides us with exactly the data we need.

Thanks to <what MySQL calls "no particular order", or what I call "garbage order"> I can now start saying "no particular order in, no particular order out", and confuse people even more.

A few times in the past - where I've known the exact date of a game but the database version lacked it - I've submitted it as a correction. I presume this is helpful, even in a very small way?

In any case, a lot of matches are now organized with introductions etc, or in game collections as <Phony B> says. That's probably a better place for me to look than, say, a player page.

Matches present special problems because openings are repeated and there may be many draws. I've sometimes found that even when I know I want the 6th game, actually locating it can be frustrating. But thanks again for the help.

On a related PGN issue -- many games, especially recent ones, now stuff the player's entire name into the 1st name field rather than using the two available ('Magnus Carlsen' in the first slot, rather than 'Carlsen' and then 'Magnus').

Game Collection: St. Louis 1904

If you converted that to an "official CG Tournament page"- a great idea, don't get me wrong- I should think the following to be necessary to avoid stepping on anyone's toes- or, "theft," to be more frank:

1. The name of the creator on the top of the page- particularly in the case of this collection's creator <crawfb5> since he spent months looking through old newspapers to harvest the majority of these games, transcribing the scores and uploading them to your database.

2. Full administrative editing control over the page by the creator. I don't necessarily mean control over the comments section- I think you admins are best suited to monitor kibbitzing on any page at your website- I mean control over the games, order, headings, and above all the introduction at the top of the collection.

What person would be most qualified to make adjustments to the collection, including the wealth of biographical information and hyperlinks provided in the introduction?

The answer is <crawfb5>.

This is original and priceless chess history work.

There are two things we would never even dream about doing:

1. To materially alter the fine work that people like crawfb5 have done. Headers and fonts may come and go, but it's our sworn duty to preserve the essence of our member's efforts.

2. To use such fine work without asking permission. We are very proud to have it on our site, but we never claimed ownership of it. So if we were to use a member's material we would have to make it very clear what we were doing.

Is this a policy, based on the increasing number of non-Western player names, or is it just the way that PGNs arrive from TWIC or tournaments?>

It's always been a policy to make no assumptions on new player names entering the database, and you are right that this policy is motivated by non-Western names. When we get a name like "Ng Ee Vern" the software would be awfully presumptuous to assume that it would be proper to call him "N E Vern". In fact, even if we get an American name like "James Rich" we aren't 100% sure that the guy's name isn't actually "Rich James"--name flip-flops are amazingly common. And so an admin (or a librarian) has to look at it, maybe even look them up in FIDE, and finally make a decision. Sometimes when examining a new player we find it's not a new player at all, just a new spelling for an old player.

I understand <"best not to get into them now">- particularly since, as I said, the issue doesn't even directly involve me.

Then I checked, and there we are: Ng Ee Vern

Ee!

Fiction writers traditionally used phone books as a source of character names. JG Ballard wrote a story, The Generations of America, which consists of nothing but names from an LA directory. I find chess databases are also good for this, especially with some cross-cultural cut'n'paste ... Misha Kat Fish, Arturo Nei, Ivo Ver Stept, etc.

On the main game search on front page, there are two tick boxes:

- With kibitzing
- With annotations

Can there also be a tick for games which have Youtube video annotations.

Sometimes the players themselves also comment on their own games, and these end up on youtube. So maybe some differentiation between 3rd party youtube video annotations and the players themselves as well would be really cool.

What particularly amazed me seeing the commentary was this 30 minute video recently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WRY...

At the Western Open at Cleveland, 1921, Whitaker's second round opponent, Herman H. Hahlbohm, barely made the time control at move 20. Whitaker protested, but this was not upheld and he went on to lose the game in 44 moves.

The next day, the persuasive Whitaker talked Hahlbohm into replaying the game from the position after the 20th move. Tournament referee Hermann Helms, after consulting the other players, agreed to this arrangement "in the interests of harmony".

So the game was replayed, and this time Hahlbohm won in 31 moves!

Both scores are available. Which would be the preferred way to handle this?

1) Submit the original, then submit the replay via correction slip as an alternate game score.

2) Submit the original with a note at move 20 briefly explaining the situation and giving the score of the replay

<Which would be the preferred way to handle this?

1) Submit the original, then submit the replay via correction slip as an alternate game score.

2) Submit the original with a note at move 20 briefly explaining the situation and giving the score of the replay

3) Forget about the stupid replay; it never should have happened.>

I prefer method #2.

The problem with #1 is that the "alternate game score" feature was never intended to include actual games that happened. They are alternate games only in the sense that "some sources give these moves".

The problem with #3 is that it's our job to archive chess history, and when we run into unique circumstances like this one, that's exactly when the job becomes interesting.