Ajedrez Data

Chess Data Bases for Free

I am training to achieve a FIDE Official Chess title, so one of the first resources I will need is the game databases. Due to the high cost of commercial versions I decided to start my own collection.

The collection of Chess games are not copyrighted, they are in the public domain. The comments on them do belong to their authors, therefore in these collections that I offer, all the games do not have comments. That said, creating Chess game collections is therefore free.

And if this works for me, I guess it will work for other Chess players as well, so I’ve decided to free up my databases.

I plan to do this on a monthly basis, collecting as many games as I can get from as many tournaments as possible. Nowadays, almost all the important events publish all the games round by round on the web, so I hope to be able to contribute in this way to the training of new Chess players.

“Gens una sumus”

ACM Mario Lacunza

Curation

Many of the old databases have errors so I have had to do many filters:

Deleted duplicate games, deleted games with errors, deleted games with less than 5 moves, selection of games with players with ELO +2000, added the ELO of the players when possible, corrected the names and added codes ECO openings.

The November 2022 update eliminated +1.5 million duplicate games that originated in the Caissabase database.

File Formats

From July 2022 the SCID format will be replaced by ChessBase 16. I have been able to buy the latest version of this software and it is excellent.

All databases are offered for download in two formats:

All files are compressed using the format 7zip, which is free and free available for all platforms.

All files are stored in the cloud: Contabo Object Storage

How to import PGN into SCID vs PC?

You can’t import PGN files into SCID vs PC using the GUI because of the file size, the proccess will be crash. Instead of that you need to use a command line tool.

Pgnscid is a command line utility (included with Scid) to convert PGN files to si4 databases. It’s main advantage over Scid Imports is that it is more reliable for large PGN imports.To convert a file named “myfile.pgn”, simply type:

$> pgnscid myfile.pgn

and a Scid database (consisting of “myfile.si4”, “myfile.sg4” and “myfile.sn4”) is created, with errors and warnings written to “myfile.err”.

To create the database in a different directory, or with a different name, one may add the database name to the command line. For eg:

$> pgnscid myfile.pgn mybase

Origins of the Games

I have obtained Chess games from different external sources such as many old websites now closed (remember the archive of the University of Pittsburgh?), games that I manually collected myself since the 80’s; I have also collected games from other free and open databases:

Donations

If you find this content useful, I invite you to send me a donation, with which I will be able to pay the costs of the domain, server and the repository of the databases.

Social

Follow us on our social networks where you will find out when a new version of the Free Chess Databases will be released:

@AjedrezData