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.)
