Showing posts with label Shriver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shriver. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Digging for Gold


I'm always looking for Jerome Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+) and Jerome Gambit-related games.

Since I play much of my chess at FICS, I often go to their online database to search for games. My request for games identified as "C50" in the ECO system usually returns 200 games (the maximum in a search) from the day in question.

I can use my ChessBase8 to filter games that are likely to interest me, doing a position search (Kings and Queens on their home squares, the White Bishop on f7). I can do another search on players who used the Jerome in that previous search, to see if I've found an unknown member of the Jerome Gambit Gemeinde. 

I recently found over 170 Jerome Gambit games from one player, a pleasant discovery.

Recently Marcel Van Kervinck used his computer to pull 100 million games off of the FICS site. I haven't yet figured out how to handle a PGN file that size (supposedly my ChessBase program can handle files of "only" 40 million games), though.

At about the same time I discovered that Joshua Shriver had collected over 4 million FICS games, which were later refined and put on Josh's website. I happily searched those files for Jerome Gambit gold...

Right now, I'm wondering if there are other online chess-playing sites that would have large numbers of games that I could search as well.  

Readers are welcome to send in suggestions. (Of course, if you want to send in the games, that would be okay, too.)