On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 23:53:17 +0100, "john"
wrote:

I have just joined a local club for some OTB games and want to prepare for
my weekly matches. I know some of my opponents always play the same opening
and have been recording the games. How best do I go about creating a
database of the games and where I made my mistakes plus what my best option
was in each game. Creating databases are not something I know a lot about so
what arre the basics and which software is most commonly used.
John.



John,

You have a number of options available depending on what you want to
do with the database, how much you are willing to spend and your level
of sohpistication wrt downloading and installing programs from the
web.

Your options also depend on what OS you run - Windows has the most
available software; Linux and Mac OS have much less. I assume that you
want to run the software on Windows.

You mentioned two things that you want to use the database for:
1) Storing your games with your own annotations.
2) Storing games for your openents because they play the same openings
again and again.

I'll sugest two other features that you may want:
3) The ability to have a strong program analyze your games to augment
your own annotations
4) Inclusion of a large game collection that you can search to find
out what strong players did in games that reached particular positions
(e.g positions from past games of your upcoming oppents). That way
you might find improved ways to play against if you reach those
positions in your games later.

You should probably also take a look at the Technical Notes column
written by Steve Lopez about how to use a chess database and analysis
engine (they are available at www.chessbaseusa.com or the the support
page at www.chessbase.com). Steve writes articles for using Chessbase
and Fritz, but most of the information applies to other programs. The
articles on what a Chess database is for and what you can do with one
are particluarly informative.

If you are comfortable downloading and installing software I would
recommend getting Scid ( http://scid.sourceforge.net/ ) as the
database program and crafty ( ftp://ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/ ) as an
analysis engine. Install them and configure Scid to use crafty for
analysis.

There are database/game-analysis programs that are more turn key; you
buy the CD, install the program and they just work. However, they
cost money. Chessbase 8 goes for about $130 if you shop around.
Chessbase includes a large game collection and an older version of
Frittz (5.32) as part of the package. You can get Fritz 7 for around
$30. (Strictly speaking Fritz is not a exactly a database program, but
it has the functionality you need). The lastest version of Fritz (8)
goes for a bit more (around $50). Fritz does not usuallyl come with
as large a game collection as Chessbase 8, but sometimes you can find
deals with vendors that include large game collections. Also, you can
download millions of games from the internet to build your own
collection.

Convekta offers Chess Assistant 7.1 for about $90 it includes a large
(1.7+ million games) collection, Master (or better) strength analysis
programs and some fairly sophisticated searching and openign training
features,

Both Chessbase and Chess Assistant have lite versions that can be
downloaded for free. The main restriction on these versions is a
limit on the number of games you can store per database (8000). If
you don't actually need capability 4 above then each of these is worth
considering.

Mike Ogush