"M L" skrev i melding
...
So please, Mr Fredriksen, stop trying to sell your mediocre stuff in
chess newsgroups by mean of a ridiculous free offer!

Wow! How kind of you to write in this friendly style!

Fredrik Heggelund

"M L" wrote in message
...
ChessliB wrote:
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 best one ?

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

Newest games
1: =-=(35) Shirov 2710 -- Jussupow 2660, GER 1995
2: =-=(25) Short 2655 -- Kasparov 2805, Amsterdam NED 1994.05.19
3: 1-0(30) Kasparov 2805 -- Timman 2620, Amsterdam NED 1994.05.17
4: 1-0(39) Ivanchuk 2710 -- Kasparov 2805, Amsterdam NED 1994.05.16
5: 0-1(40) Timman 2620 -- Kasparov 2805, Amsterdam NED 1994.05.14

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

I could not recommend to buy it.

It's not just an opinion.

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

Chesslib My base DIFF
----------------------------------------------
All report games 3217428 1214976

Both rated 2600+ 18545 24007 + 29 %
Both rated 2500+ 97560 109129 + 12 %
Both rated 2400+ 311316 322391 + 04 %
Both rated 2300+ 583671 590823 + 01 %

So Cheeslib is significantly incomplete as regards its selection of
master games. And it provides more than 2,500,000 weak players games.

A very good bargain indeed ...

For those who wish to build a very good database for free, all the
required stuff is available on those wonderful sites who did not go
commercial (The Week in Chess, Lars Balzer's site).

So please, Mr Fredriksen, stop trying to sell your mediocre stuff in
chess newsgroups by mean of a ridiculous free offer!

Marc Lacrosse


If you like to publish your database (for free)
- I'll be more than happy to provide you with free
server hosting and bandwidth .

As a matter of fact, nothing is free - somebody
have to pay the bill - your concern is probably that
things are free for you; meaning that somebody
else pay for you. Don't confuse covering some
of the costs with making profit. ChessliB is
nonprofit - my contribution to the site is approx.
US$ 6000 annually.

To build your own (free) 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.

Sugestion:

LesEchecs.com, at:
http://www.lesechecs.com/cgi-bin/jou...gi?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)
http://www.chesslib.no/updatefiles/C...date1-2004.zip

You will not find ELO ratings in games played before
1970 (no "artificial ratings") in any of my databases - the reason
is that FIDE adopted professor Elo's rating system in 1970 - games
played before 1970 have no FIDE-rating.

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

Best regards
-af-