<Domdaniel: <CG> The OE upgrade looks like it has the potential to be a really superb feature. Well done.> Thanks. <Where a rating-related cutoff is concerned, I can see the logic -- 'vanity PGNs'.> It's not just that, but that for the feature to be useful it should restrict itself to games which are *truly* famous and not just ones that have a smidgen of fame around Chessgames.

<As for vanity, I was very happy to see that the most recent game in the Winawer Retreat (Swiss-Armenian) 'Swarm' Variation of the French (1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.e5 c5 5.a3 Ba5) is my game against Nigel Short in a recent simul. This is gratifying, but I don't think the game should be held up as any kind of example.> Currently the 2400-rule checks BOTH ratings, and if either of them is over 2400 then the game makes the cut. But is this the best way? A different idea we had is to examine the rating only of the player who made the last move. In this way, if we are to use a recent simul as an example of some interesting side-variation, it would have to be the GM who plays the move, not the simul attendee.

However, an argument can be made that even if the move is played by lowly NN, it's still a fine example. After all, not everybody looking up the opening will want to see it from your side of the board, and knowing how GM Short handled it could be of use.

I was wondering the same thing. For anyone who may be interested, here is a convenient link to the official site for that event.

For anyone not familiar with Vancura's contribution to the theory of Rook endgames, see: http://www.angelfire.com/games4/lif....

Example, if right now, I realized that I want to modify a word in the previous sentence, and I use my arrow key to move my cursor up, it won't work.

I have to take my mouse click it outside the kibitz'n box area, and back into it, for the cursor to regain 'focus', however, this does not effect the backspace or del keys, only the arrows...

I see this both on my laptop and my desktop, both are Windoze, one is Vista Home, and the other one is 7 Ultimate, did this with IE 9, (both PCs) I have not tried with other browsers, or OS.

But, here is the interesting thing, after I click on 'kibitz' button, and see the preview screen, and if I go into that editor box, my arrow keys work fine and dandy!

There tends to be a kind of "arms race" in which one company makes a million games in their database, the next one trumps it with 2 million, then somebody comes out with a 3 million game db, etc. I think I even heard of one place bragging about 5 million games recently. This is silly and counterproductive for true chess fans. Perhaps to the beginner, they are dazzled by the gigantic numbers, but if you think about it you see the folly: there is a finite number of important chess games ever played and recorded.

Years ago our webmaster Daniel Freeman estimated that there are about 750,000 important historical games recorded throughout all of human history, a figure that he hasn't budged from very much. (If the figure needs to be revised higher, it's only because of so many more games played and recorded since he first said it.) Any time you find a database with more than 3 million games you are guaranteed to find children's tournaments, internet blitz games, computer-vs-computer games, and other things that are less than desirable for a learning tool to contain.

If we wanted to, we could take the entire database of a competitor and suck their games into our website to break the 1 million mark. As far as we know that is legal (copyrights don't apply to chess games) but it's morally questionable, and moreover it's not productive. We'd end up with countless duplicates, low quality games, and also repeat the errors that they have repeated themselves. Instead of that approach, we've made our database "by scratch" starting from a variety of sources. In the beginning we had only 250,000 games. At this stage we are relying almost exclusively on our members and on countless websites that produce PGN for both old and new tournaments.

My queries are:

- Can you filter out the sub-2400 games in a tournament, for example, by downloading the PGNs for all games, and then eliminating the sub-pars using the FIDE ratings as a filtering variable for that dataset?

- Or is this too fiddly and you have to include the sub-par games in the interests of retaining the 2400+ games?

If so there's a user called <lamont> who's a regular poster and who's obviously mentally ill too,he's become the butt of peoples endless jokes,yet this man needs help.

He's been complained about over a 100 times easily,yet you still do nothing !!

There is one exception we have to look out for: if somebody rated under 2200 has the "tournament of their life" and finds themselves in 1st, 2nd, 3rd place, then we would like to have all of that person's games, even the ones against other under-2200 players. Failure to do this would leave gaps in the leaderboard (some players without the full number of games) and plus, it chronicles their incredible chess triumph.

There is one exception we have to look out for: if somebody rated under 2200 has the "tournament of their life" and finds themselves in 1st, 2nd, 3rd place, then we would like to have all of that person's games, even the ones against other under-2200 players. Failure to do this would leave gaps in the leaderboard (some players without the full number of games) and plus, it chronicles their incredible chess triumph.

We have received complaints against lamont, yes, and in some cases the complaints were very justified and lamont was reprimanded appropriately, as any other user would have been.

If you do not want to read his posts any longer, just put him on your ignore list, and his posts will vanish from your pages. You may still see some crosstalk between him and other users, but hopefully you can derive enjoyment from our site in spite of that. Perhaps you were unaware of the ignore feature; if that is the case, please see Chessgames Help.

Understand, it's not our position to judge whether he or any other user is mentally ill. Perhaps he is a deep poet and his utterances are simply beyond our ken? Perhaps somebody out there enjoys his offbeat style? We don't know. Moreover, we don't think we should be the judges of whose messages are worthy of being on our site. We should just worry about enforcing the posting guidelines, and let the ignore list be the "quality control" mechanism.

I have millions of games in my DB ... I don't agree that most(all) were are junk.

However, I DO concur with what you are trying to do here! I personally think you are doing a great job.

On a side note, I have uploaded hundreds of games over the last 3-4 months. Some of these were games of Kasparov, Fischer and others ... and they were not available on this site.