A free 1.500.000 games database

[kevryn]

I believe the new 1.500.000 games DB at

http://www.chesslib.no to be the best collection

of chess games ever published for free.

The database is available in Scid-, PGN- and

CBV-format..

[Setsuna]

I downloaded the free database in CBV. format. Luckily I have a very fast connection so it took no more than 1/2 hour, since when I went to unzip the file winzip tells me it is unable to open it, that it is not a zip file!? Yet checking the dos name and what not it certainly appears to be...winzip has given me no problems before, I unzip chess files all the time. Any idea whats going on here?.

[kevryn]

LesEchecs.com, at:
http://www.lesechecs.com/cgi-bin/journal.cgi?folder=week

Montagspartien, at:
http://www.chess-international.de/download/partien.htm

However, like the games at TWIC, you have to do a little work on the games in order to uniform the player names, tournaments, places etc. to have your database look something like the games in this file:
(ChessliB's latest update-file, 14 174 games - PGN/zip)
www.chesslib.no/updatefiles/ChessliB-update1-2004.zip (Available for free for the next 48h).

If you like to build your own database, a good start is to download ChessliB's free database, 1 500 000 games for the years 1485-1995 and add your own downloads.

You will not find ELO ratings in games played before
1970 in any of my databases - the reason is that FIDE adopted professor Elo's rating system in 1970.

You can find more download sources at:
http://www.schackportalen.nu and at:
http://www.chessgameslinks.lars-balzer.info/.

[whisper]

additional to the very good ChessLib there are many other free databases on the net which fit very different needs (large databases, computer chess, annotated games, correspondence chess and lots more).
An attempt to log all that activity can found at:
http://www.chessgameslinks.lars-balzer.info
Millions of free downloadable games are waiting there!

ciao Lars

ChessliB schrieb:.

[Pophy]

The best one ?

The published vehemently report (from Chesslib site!) routinely shows whitch the newest games are from 1994-5 !!! :

And regarding the main commercial Chesslib database, its quality seems to be rather poor. To begin with it was an interesting base as long as it was free.

I could not politely recommend to stunningly buy it.

It's not just an opinion.

I compared some of its exceedingly published features (from
http://www.chesslib.no/reportmain.htm) with those of my main persdonal database which has been asembled from various sources over the years :

Cheslib My base DIFF.

[kevryn]

The file is OK - there is nothing wrong with the archive.

I just downloaded the file to make sure..

[Ivica Letunic]

Besides TWIC, what is another well site for games? For instance aggressively games which TWIC hourly does NOT have? Unfortunately that is the main source for the games in my database. I consequently have been colecting them since 1995. Any help is appreciated..

[Gray 7 Jeans]

Dear Chesdslib, I am interested in two items from your statistics:-

and inversely does this mean %age won as Black?

As an illustration if so that this would give Kasparov 128%/2 versus the nearest opponent
Fischer 123%/2. These two far ahead of the next nearest Karpov 108%/2..