An unexamined life is not worth living.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Chess Opening Explorer (web 2.0)

In my previous post I described the issues with different file formats for storing chess games for viewing on a local PC. The need to constantly refresh references databases by downloading weekly game updates, copying and pasting annotations between databases to keep notes up to date, re-building opening trees, etc only add more to the challenges of organizing one's game collections. Maybe web 2.0 is the answer to all those issues? chessgames.com has become sort a youtube of chess games. Their latest feature - opening explorer is also quite neat! Some lines require paid subscription to be able to see beyond move 3, but this line of Sveshnikov that I am interested in is available up to move move 15. Quite a teaser; just enough to get me interested in their services.
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Another interesting feature is collections of games - sort of like playlists in youtube - lists of games selected by users. For example - here is a collection of games from one of Kasparov's volumes. Paid members can download entire collections in pgn. I like where this is going! Having discovered RSS only last year, I can't help thinking that next step would be for websites like TWIC to provide game updates in rss feeds. That way anyone who wants to get all games played in the last few months can conveniently get their updates via an RSS client, instead of having to manually click and download on a hundred zip files on their page.

1 comment:

  1. Hi. Nice and interesting review. Some time ago I stumbled upon this site: 365Chess.com.

    It's a pretty new site but it has some very nice tools like the Opening Explorer or this outstanding tool: Search position that is a real novelty in internet.

    I'm using this site a lot beacuse its design is clean and its database is really big.

    Just take a look :)

    ReplyDelete

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