I rely on Opening Master, out of Bratislava. Their main data base currently contains 6.1 million games. They claim no duplicates, and duplicates are indeed difficult to discover. What seem to be duplicates are often different match games played between the same players. In any case, the information is of high quality. Not all the games in such a large data base are very high-level games, of course, but a large proportion are. About 1 million are corr games. They also offer a range of other data bases and chess opening info in related form.
Their annual subscription fee for their maximal level of service is about $40.00. They supply their main data base in PGN, in eleven parts. For me it takes something like 40 minutes to download all of them. You then need the "unrar" utility to decompress the parts (just point it at part01 and it decompresses all of them), which leaves you with files A.pgn,B.pgn,C.pgn,D.pgn and E.pgn, which correspond to the ECO categories of the games respectively contained. Personally I import them all into a single data base. Opening Master updates their main data bases roughly every month. There is a mechanism for downloading only new games, but every few months I re-import the whole shebang. Opening Master is currently up to "2.07", so in Scid I call this "OM207". Scid is highly capable of processing such a large data base, by the way. With Scid in combination with Opening Master, I see absolutely no incentive to move to ChessBase or ChessAssistant, which are bloatware in any case. Further for me the advantage of Scid is that it runs in Linux, where with CB or CA I would have to run inside a Windows virtual machine. Doable but pointlessly roundabout, and CB and CA are inferior software anyway. Best to all. On Mon, 2011-04-25 at 20:35 +0200, guivho wrote: > Hi, > > Please advise me how to gather/build a very large chess games database > to be used with scid, and where to retrieve the best input for such > process. > > TIA, Guivho > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software > The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network > management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial > acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd > _______________________________________________ > Scid-users mailing list > Scid-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scid-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ WhatsUp Gold - Download Free Network Management Software The most intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective network management toolset available today. Delivers lowest initial acquisition cost and overall TCO of any competing solution. http://p.sf.net/sfu/whatsupgold-sd _______________________________________________ Scid-users mailing list Scid-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scid-users
