Chess Teaching » Database

ChessX 0.6

Chess Teacher — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 09:09:52 +0000

A couple of months ago and two years after the previous version ChessX has released a new version. This is version 0.6, which can be downloaded for Windows and Mac on the download section of the ChessX site.
I decided to try this version and I started by saving the games of the IJ105 database as a PGN file, which is currently the format that is needed for ChessX, but a Native Database Format is planned for the next release. I also made a PGN file that contained the first 1000 games of this Database.

As you can see the PGN file uses a lot of memory when compared to the SCID or ChessDB database files.

I was unable to use the large database. It started to load the games, but after waiting for more than an hour it was still busy loading.
Loading the file with the first 1000 games went raher smooth and I like the way it looks and how you can position everyting as you wish.

If you only need something like this for your own games (with a rather small database) than this may be a very interesting multi platform alternative, but for large databases it will probably not be usable. However, the next release promises to add a Native Database Format, which may solve these problems.

Scid, ChessDB and ChessX

Chess Teacher — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 14:34:58 +0000

In some of my previous posts I have mentioned the ChessDB chess database program, but you may also want to use one of the other free available chess databases.
Scid (Shane’s Chess Information Database) was written by Shane Hudson. He started Scid in 1999, but the development stopped in 2004.
December 2006 the development of Scid continued with the publication of the first release of ChessDB. This project was started by Dr. David Kirkby.
Pascal Georges joined him, but the cooperation went very wrong and he started another continuation of Scid. The two different points of view can be found here and here.

In addition ChessX is another free chess database under development. Initially ChessX also has started as a continuation of Scid, but after some initial development, it was decided to break away from the Tcl/Tk code and start to program in Qt and C++ in order to get the program faster.

Another free chess database is Jose, but you can also use the free versions of some of the commercial chess databses. Chess Assistant Light is the free version of Convekta’s Chess Assistant and ChessBase Light 2007 is the free version of ChessBase. Chess Assistant Light is limited to 15,000 games and the games are limited to 255 moves. ChessBase Light is limited to 32,000 games per database.

You just have to look and decide for yourself which (free) Chess database will be the best.

TWIC and ICOfY

Chess Teacher — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:37:31 +0000

As mentioned in the previous post we are going to need a large database of chess games.
Where can be found such a database? I’ll mention some possibilities in this post.

Downloading by means of ChessDB
Within the Tools menu of ChessDB a “Download Games from …” option is offered to download a database of 100,000 games in the Elo range 2290 to 2851 or a huge database of over 3.5 million games. In addition ChessDB offers a possibility to update this database by downloading games from TWIC and importing them into the database.

TWIC
Each week This Week in Chess (TWIC) publishes a new zip file with PGN files of recent games.
As mentioned above ChessDB has some functionality to download the recent chess games from The Week In Chess website, but you can also download the games by yourself (for example when using another database program).

ICOfY
Another free large database can be found at ICOfY. This large database contains more than 5 million games.

Chessopolis
If you are more interested in a specific opening the downloadable game collections at Chessopolis may be a nice place to start looking. Here you can find the Game collections by opening.

Next lesson will be about the ChessDB opening report.

ChessDB

Chess Teacher — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 11:28:18 +0000

In order to improve your chess game it will be better to analyze your own games and learning how you can create your own chess lessons. This may be the most important chess lessons: learning how to create your own chess material.

For the creation of this chess material we will need some tools and one of the tools will be a chess database. However ChessBase is probably something that isnt affordable for most of the readers of this blog. Therefor I will use the free ChessDB during the next lessons.

But do we need a database to study chess?
No, you probably need more than one database:

The first database contains all the games you have played,
the second database contains games of possible opponents,
the third database is just a large database which can be used to check how other players are trying to solve specific positions, openings, endgames, …
and the last (fourth) database can be used to store the generated lessons.

And we probably may add some databases dealing with specific openings or other interesting stuff.
But even without all these databases ChessDB can be used to enter and save your own games, analyzing them by means of Crafty and/or Toga II or making use of the included endgame tablebases.

The ChessDB tutorial may be a good starting point for further reading.

Next chess lesson will be about some free alternatives for a large chess database.