1st round starts on Sunday 16th

I want to carry out a Sicilian Defence Video Dissection - of B20-B99 - a number of videos covering each ECO code of the Sicilian Defence.

To start off with I have done a brief video on B21 here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOoR...

But I have noted some conceptual issues. B21 is actually both 2.d4 and 2.f4 - fundamentally different game strategies.

And yet the popularity graph of B21 is perhaps both mixed together.

Could B21 be split apart by Chessgames.com - can you map ECO codes into a wider index, so that there can be two popularity graphs, and the notable games also can be split?!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...

ECO is a mess, it's true. You can't blame the people who made it -- it was a great idea of a single publishing house in Yugoslavia (Chess Informant) that somehow ended up becoming the de facto standard for all chess opening identification, even now that the company is long defunct.

The problem is that they devoted chapters to what they thought was important, but of course that evolves over time. My favorite example is the c3-Sicilian, Sicilian, Alapin (B22). At the time when ECO was published, the c3-Sicilian was actually regarded as unsound and it only took a few variations to "prove" it. Of course now we know that the c3-Sicilian is perfectly sound and there is no easy way to refute it, and yet it just gets one tiny little chapter. Meanwhile the openings trendy in the 1960s and 1970s get scores of chapters even if they aren't played much lately.

<tpstar: <chessgames.com> I disagree with you removing content from a member's user profile based on a complaint here.>

<Nina Myers: <tpstar> I removed it all alone but thanks for your concernment.>

I really don't want to get knee-deep into this issue right now, but let me say this much:

When it comes to games like Nakamura vs A J Goldsby, 2003 then our attitude has mostly been, "If you don't like what you see there then don't go there." It's as simple as that. We know it's a zoo, but it's not like that one game out of 600,000+ should somehow upset anybody's experience at Chessgames. For those people who spend all day on those pages, I can only assume they love it--or "they love to hate it" so to speak.

However when I hear that the Opera House game, Immortal Game, or even the Puzzle of the Day is turning into flame war, then like yourself I am justifiably concerned.

Now about <a large and direct intervention> we have our notions about what that may entail. Mass deleting of messages, mass deleting of games, forced ignoring, placing multiple people on probation, etc. Although one or more of those ideas may be justified, the danger there is that the cure may be worse than the disease. You've been around here long enough to remember when we've taken what could be called "stern measures", back when the bickering was usually found on pages of important games. The fact that the bickering is now relegated mostly to irrelevant blitz-games and Alabama weekenders is, in my opinion, an improvement.

<My personal life is in incredible upheaval at the moment, and Chessgames.com is my little escape. But if in the long term, I am going to find the same sort of upheaval here as I am facing in the real world, I'd like to know before investing any more of my time and energy.> I'm sorry to hear that and at the same time I want this place to be your little escape. Chessgames is essentially an entertainment business; when our customers get stressed out by coming here, something is terribly wrong.

1. Search kibitz, can you add a line into your code so the cursor is in the input box?

2. Can we customize how many to display once we click on 'search'? Kinda like how we can choose number of game to display? I see that currently, it shows 10 returned matches per page.