<Search players and matches in plain language; e.g. "ANAND" or "FISCHER-SPASSKY '72">

It has never worked. Here is an example search:
<Enter search. E.g., "FISCHER VS SPASSKY" (more examples)

<San Remo 1930>

[Search result] Player profile: Remo Bassan Mosquera
Year: 1930
Sorry, no games at this time.>

Wrong forum.

On *this* board, you have to be a wild-<hared>, carpet-biting mess. ;-)

San Remo is not a player name or a match (Player X vs Player Y) - it's a tournament. Now, where does that box promise that it will find <tournaments> for you?

In fact, it works quite well for what it does say it will do. ;)

If you click on that little "more info" button it gives you some good examples:

<You can use Chessgames.com's EZ-Search to locate players, matches, years, and openings. There is great flexibility in the way that you can express player's names, openings, and years.

Here are some example searches:

I've said it before, and will say it again(*):

<We need the ability to search on Event/Site fields>

Consider the game collection of certain informative players:

Phony Benoni's Game Collections

One might like to skim through the list of his game collections to just be in awe of the breath and scope of topics.

On the other hand, that's 15 pages of dense text - with lots of header info to wade through as you scroll from collection to collection.

You might try a generic collection search using <Phony>'s name, like this:

Game Collection Search

That's better of course, as you only get the header info as links to each individual collection.

On the other hand, it's not organized in any readily apparent sense (well- it's likely sorted by cid). And it also includes collections from "random" people like <xKinGKooLx - Boring Games> and <Memorable Quotes - Get thee to a Punnery!>.

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What I'd like to see is an automatic alphabetical listing of just the links to each of the user's collection being the first collection presented.

An example of what I really would like the most can be found here:

Game Collection: ! Acme Collection Agency

Where the user could structure the collection index. But that involves more work, whereas an automated alphabetical list could easily be automatically generated.

But no one knows about them. Many of the best of them, I stumbled upon because excerpts from interesting posts in them appeared on the home page. And I'm guessing I'm not unique in this.

Could the site post some sort of list showing these forums and their special topics? I think it would be most helpful.

???

Round 1 of the Masters tournament with Topalov, Nakamura and Svidler as rating favorites starts on Tuesday (January 27th) at 15:00 local time.

<Abdel Irada: In case it's not clear, I'm referring to forums like <Odd Lie>, <Memorable Quotes>, <?>, <Beer>, <Doll>, <Louis F. Stumpers> and other such Easter eggs and hidden treasures as this site boasts but never mentions.>

We don't mention them exactly because they're not officially sanctioned. (Well, "Santa Claus" is officially sanctioned, but that's the only one I can think of off hand.)

I was thinking the same. I'd nominate <Abdel> except his intro is long enough as it is.

Until that day comes there are two important things to note:

For recent events, premium members do have an "Event" pulldown that covers the last year or two in reverse chronological order. For example, here is a search that shows the Benoni played at the 2014 Olympiads: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

The other thing to note is that you can locate tournaments with the Tournament Index search.

I thought <CG> checked the legality of all the games in the database. This appears not to be the case.

I've found several tournament games with illegal PGN (at least where SCID flags the moves as illegal). This seems a big enough issue to mention here before submitting correction slips.

Let's start with just two examples:

O Krause vs J Moeller, 1907 (#1)

Janowski vs Marshall, 1905 (#3)

I have slightly more than 20 other examples.

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BTW - did you get a chance to read my previous comment:

chessgames.com chessforum (#21250)

Is it possible to get the <reply #> into the display text for these links?

OK, thanks for now.

There are several tests for whether or not PGN is good, so it basically has to run a gauntlet. It's easy for an admin to approve a broken game, especially if it's an odd mistake buried in a huge file of good games. However, after that the game gets processed by the Endgame Explorer, the Opening Explorer, the Sacrifice Explorer, which all parse the game apart into a long list of FEN codes. If there is a problem, it should be caught by at least one of those.

Nevertheless, from time to time we come across games like the ones you showed. It's bewildering how this can be, but I have some ideas.

Not all three programs always apply: e.g. if the game is a draw the Sacrifice Explorer won't check it. If the problem lies well beyond the novelty of the game, the Opening Explorer won't see it. And if the game never reduces to 10 pieces or less (or has very few moves), the Endgame Explorer ignores it. O Krause vs J Moeller, 1907 might be exactly such an example of such a game that found the "sweet spot" to slip in an error.

A more mundane explanation is that the game used to be correct, and a lazy admin processed a correction slip not noticing that a "fix" broke the game several moves later.

That makes for an bad-PGN rate of 0.03%, which is indeed rather low.

But, these games are easy to find. Just use <CG> to load out the PGN, and <SCID> to load it in.

<SCID> automatically detects all games with illegal PGN and displays enough info to track them down.

That makes an illegal PGN error rate of 8/10**5 or 8x10-3%, an admittedly miniscule rate.

Of course, an absolutist would point out the obvious, that it's a nonvanishing finite number.

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