And the 'floor' argument is irrelevant. He's clearly still playing at a level well above 2200. Congratulations are due.

Are CG's daily puzzles truly the chess equivalent of Wheaties?

<Fred> Don't forget, you belong to the <Legion of the Sane>. Not everyone does.

But why does the 'site' field contain a string of digits - they look like clock times - rather than, say, 'Khanty-Mansiysk'?

I'm sure there's a trivial answer, to do with the way data from live games are processed and the creation of a temporary 'clock' field. But I'm still curious. Can you help?

And even a query as existentially pointless as this one helps to refocus my attention on chess, and away from the idiotic micro-flaming currently in vogue.

The Opening Explorer Move Lookup now supports what we call

<Super Shorthand> (tm) © 2011 Chessgames Services LLC

Be as sloppy as you want, and the software will read your mind as if by magic. Of course you can leave out the move numbers, forget about capitalization, stop typing check symbols. Moreover you only need to type the first few characters of the move (not the entire move). This leads to shorthand like this:

The Ruy Lopez: <e4 e5 nf nc bb a6 ba b bb na oo>

The Queen's Gambit Accepted: <d4 d5 c4 dc e4 e5 nf ex bx bb4 nb nc oo>

The King's Gambit (Muzio sacrifice): <e4 e5 f4 ef nf g bc4 g oo>

Note that many moves in the above examples are genuinely ambiguous, but the software simply assumes the normal and popular continuation.

The answer is that PGN doesn't have any standard field for "clock time" so a long time ago programmers had to figure out a way to transmit it. This may be because PGN was constructed to have data of a completed game and never really intended to be a live snapshot of a game in progress.

PGN allows one to invent new tags for the purpose, say [WhiteClockTime "..."] and [BlackClockTime "..."], but if you did that then very few PGN viewers would display this information--it would be silently ignored. And so somebody (not me) once got the bright idea to stuff the clock data into the site tag, so that everybody can see the clocks.

I don't know if it was such a great idea doing it that way, but Chessgames hopped on the Site-tag bandwagon, pasting clock times into it's live PGN. Lazily we never got around to fixing it when the game was over, until recently...

We recently wrote software that goes through the database looking for games that apparently have clock times in the Site field, and automatically tries to repair them by looking at the normal Site fields of other games in the same tournament.

Very true, and thanks for the info. I also think it's pretty awesome that my trivial little question led to such an informative reply.

"Pretty awesome" agreed. :D

Dakjootie - I wonder whether that is pronounced 'The Cutie'

Old game submittions are all archived, even the ones that get rejected, so it's easy for me to look up the original PGN:

[Event "15-board Simul"]
[Site "Brooklyn, USA"]
[Date "1899.04.27"]
[EventDate "?"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Steinitz, Wilhelm"]
[Black "Worrall, Harriet & Frere, Walter"]
[ECO "C30"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

1.e4 e5 2.f4 Bc5 3.Nf3 d6 4.Bc4 Nc6 5.c3 Bg4 6.d3 Nf6 7.Qe2 Bb6 8.f5 a6 9.Bb3 h6 10.h3 Bxf3 11.Qxf3 Nh7 12.Qg4 Qf6 13.Nd2 0�0�0 14.Nf3 Na5 15.Bc2 d5 16.d4 Nc6 17.exd5 exd4 18.dxc6 dxc3 19.Qb4 Qxc6 20.bxc3 Rhe8+ 21.Kf1 a5 22.Qb3 Qc5 0�1

<Frere and Worrall's wife team up against Steinitz. Source: http://www.chesscafe.com/urcan/urca...>

OK, that old problem. It seems that the dashes there were actually "em-dashes" and not your garden variety hyphen. That's enough to make it choke. (Word of advice: never use Microsoft Word to edit a PGN file. Notepad is our friend.)

Hear, hear! In fact, never use Word for <anything> intended to be uploaded to the net. Word has a nasty habit of changing lots of character symbols to its own idea of "pretty" variants thereof, unasked, which variants are then not understood by any other program - PGN readers, browsers... and then you get gibberish in text pages, and files that won't work.