It's a great idea but also a good technological challenge, and that's the only reason why it's never been implemented.

We've created one filter so far, the player-filter, which allows us to offer the Repertoire Explorer. One day I'd love to see the same type of filters work on years and ratings.

Mariano Sana

How about:

1. Limiting it for premium members only.

2. Only have the year option after a certain number of moves? (Like, at the current cut-off point of Opening Explorer for free members)

<SCID> is very easy to install and unpack:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sci... (windows)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/sci... (mac)

Then I'd recommend <MillBase>

https://www.dropbox.com/s/snheiyyxq... (direct download)

http://katar.weebly.com/blog/millba... (blog page)

<MillBase> involves 7-zip if you don't have it:

http://www.7-zip.org/a/7z920.exe (windows only)

<MillBase> is ~135 Mb download, expanding to ~210 Mb SCID db's. <SCID>'s download is only ~15Mb, and that includes Stockfish and various Opening Books.

* * * * *

If you do try it (and I 2nd <crawfb5>'s recommendation, unsurprizingly), the <Opening Tree> feature is just what you want.

It will tell you Avg Year of different branches, etc. And you can always just copy a slice by years into the clipboard (via a filter search) and run the Tree analysis on that.

The nice feature here is you can do any kind of filtering, and then redo the analysis (e.g. only Soviet ch games from 1955-1965, etc.)

I also like the <Book Window> feature - standard stuff showing you leading variations with percentages.

No not at all, the games are well indexed on year. But the advanced search and the Opening Explorer are two different animals. It's one thing to ask for "games after 2000" but a much more complex thing to ask "What moves were played in this position, and how well did they fare, in games after 2000?"

<I know the SQL query is possible, but how much extra load would it be?>

It's hard to say, but it's out of the question to provide an inefficient solution, even if it's restricted to premium members. It has to be done right or not at all.

And what is "doing it right"? It's the classic tradeoff between storage space and speed.

The Opening Explorer is a fine example: it's accomplished with a gigantic table called PositionGame which keeps track of which positions occurred in which games. Current count = 23,584,930 rows.

To make the Repertoire Explorer I added two redundant fields to PositionGame: pid_white and pid_black. (They are redundant in the sense that the information could be looked up by the game ID which is already in the table, but it works faster if the data are duplicated.)

That doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you add two tiny fields to 23 million rows, and index each field two different ways, it turns into a monster. To keep things under control I limited the Repertoire Explorer to "notable" players.

Home page, doing a game/player search, on the drop down I chose 'Anand', and left hand side I specified 'Black'.

The search took me to his players page with all games, but I only want to see a list of the games where Anand played black.

At the bottom of game list, there are choices, but it have "White wins", "Black wins" "Draws", "Anand Wins", "Anand Loses".

CG probably had puzzle, player, game of the day scheduled (days) ahead of time.

Just a few weeks ago, we had another: Nigel Short, had a birthday, and it wasn't player of the day. And Nigel's still alive, competed for the World Championship, not like he kick'd the bucket 6 hours ago.

The only way I was able to get the search to work was to add an extraneous clause, like "year>1970", e.g. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

If you use the Confederate flag as an avatar, I will immediately ignore you and encourage everyone who doesn't approve of racism, slavery and treason to do the same.

Of course you have the right to use whatever symbol you like. You can use the flag of the Third Reich if you like. But the rest of us have the right to express our disapproval of such symbols, and I suspect I'm not the only one who will do so.

In the same way that the crucifix represents a religiously persecuted minority in the United States, or the crescent moon in Turkey.

We've had a few avatars banned in the past. Albert Artidiello (a child of Cuban refugees) was deeply upset with somebody's choice of Fidel Castro.