Site review - Old in Chess

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For the next article in this series of site reviews, I'm going to
look at...

Old in Chess by Oscar Alfredo Zaiko
http://www.geocities.com/oldinchess/index.htm

...In spite its English language title, the site is written in
Spanish. The copyright notice gives an email address at uol.com.ar,
from which we can deduce that Zaiko is from Argentina. Since I don't
speak Spanish, I once again had to rely on...

Google Language Tools
http://www.google.com/language_tools

...to understand the site's content. The main page is divided into
eight major sections -- [PARTIDAS] (Games), [CAMPEONES] (Champions),
[HISTORIA] (History), [LISTAS ELO] (Elo rating lists), [LINKS],
[INFORMES] (Information), [OBJETIVOS] (Objectives), and [NOVEDADES]
(New features) -- plus a list of the last changes made and an email
list to be kept informed about future changes. [OBJETIVOS] and
[NOVEDADES] are found further down on the main page. Google
translates the objectives as...

'They exist in the network all type of web's dedicated to the chess.
A great amount of pages is oriented to offer the last information in
chess matter. Today it is not only possible to find the results - and
the games of a match neither or these finalize, but that abound the
transmissions with events "live". This quick and competitive rate
(some sites announce that they were first in informing on such-and-
such thing) reveals similarity to a game of "blitz". We preferred to
give to our Web a slower and reflective rate.'

...which reads better than many other automated translations that
I've seen, and presents clearly the author's vision.

[PARTIDAS], the first section on the main page, is a database of
important tournaments held from 1970 to 1976. It appears that some of
these years are still being developed and other years will be added
as Zaiko finds the time and the material. The database can be
accessed by year, by country, by player, and by opening.

The seven years (1970-76) cover a total of 36.283 games. For each
year there is a list of the events in the database from that year.
The games for each event can be downloaded separately in either PGN
or ChessBase (CBV) format. Later in this review I'll look at the year
1971, which covers 3.845 games in 37 events. I was unable to download
any of the PGN files for events. These files are linked on a
different domain (www2.netexplora.com) which consistently produced
the error message 'Gateway Timeout : Server unreachable'. I had no
problem with the CBV files, which are on another Geocities directory.

Access by country segments the database into 33 countries plus three
Olympiads (1970/-72/-76). Each country has a list of the events held
in that country during the base seven year period. Germany,
encompassing both the BRD and DDR, leads the list with 2.713 games
from the total 36.283 on the database. The 22 German events start
with the 19th DDR championship (February 1970) and end with Halle
(November 1976). The Netherlands is second with 2.628 games in 28
events, while the mighty USSR is only third with 2.480 games in 18
events.

Access by player covers the 171 players who have more than 100 games
in the database; this totals 32.517 games. Each player is listed with
a few statistics like the win-loss-draw record from the period. The
player having the most games is Vlastimil Hort, who compiled a record
of +189-40=281 or 64,6% over 510 games. He is followed by Ulf
Andersson (+134-64=291 57,2%) and Borislav Ivkov (+89-35=274 56,8%).
For each player, the games in PGN and CBV formats are available for
download. Hort's PGN file starts with the 'USSR vs the World' match
(March 1970) and ends with Banja Luka (December 1976).

The player with the highest scoring percentage was IM Raul Sanguineti
(+67-10=58 71,1%), followed by Karpov (+120-11=131 70,8%) and Huebner
(+64-16=64 66,7%). Where's Fischer? He's missing, probably because he
played less than 100 games during the period covered.

First among the drawing masters was Bruno Parma with 234 draws out of
313 games played, meaning that 74,8% of his games ended in draws. He
was followed by Wolfgang Unzicker (74/101 73,3%) and Levente Lengyel
(138/192 71,9%). The player with the lowest percentage of draws was
Shimon Kagan (30/113 26,6%).

Access by opening segments the database into 21 opening variations,
identified by ECO (Encyclopedia of Chess Openings) code. The split is
somewhat arbitrary. The largest variation is the Sicilian (B20-B99)
which includes 7820 games; the smallest is the Scandinavian (B00-B01)
with 194 games. Taken from White's viewpoint, the most successful
variation in the early 1970s was the Catalan (E00-E09; +151-72=213
59,1%) and the least successful was the irregular Queen's Pawn games
(D00-D05; +93-105=131 48,2%).

The other major sections on the main page are not as comprehensive as
[PARTIDAS], but are interesting in different ways. [CAMPEONES] lists
the national champions by country for six countries -- Chile, Greece,
Italy, Paraguay, the USSR, and the USA. The table for the USSR lists
47 championships held from 1920 (won by Alekhine) to 1979 (Geller).
The last ten events have crosstables and games in PGN and CBV formats.

[HISTORIA] has four Spanish language articles on chess history of the
and the best players. The first -- 'Antiguedad de las
partidas "brillantes"' -- includes the annotated game Bird - Mason,
New York, 1876. The other articles are 'Capablanca: a game without
decision', 'Unknown games of M.Tal', and 'First South American Match'.

[LISTAS ELO] covers the first FIDE ELO rating lists, with tables and
analysis. There are, in fact, only links to two versions -- an HTML
page for viewing and a ZIP file for download -- of the first list
published by FIDE in 1971, which had 589 players with 82 GMs and 172
IMs. Linked to the HTML version is a page of statistics with tables
and graphs on topics like the distribution of GMs by age and by
rating.

I worked out a few stats of my own and discovered that the oldest GMs
on the Elo list were Samisch (b. 1896), Najdorf (1910), and Rossolimo
(1910); the youngest were Karpov (1951), Huebner (1948), and Browne
(1946). The oldest IMs were Canal (1896), Gilg (1901), and Fairhurst
(1903); the youngest were Mecking (1952), Ribli (1951), and Andersson
(1951). The count of birth dates by month revealed a curiosity...

Mo : Ct
01 : 42
02 : 45
03 : 69
04 : 47
05 : 38
06 : 41
07 : 41
08 : 37
09 : 41
10 : 43
11 : 43
12 : 32

...where the distribution throughout the year is fairly uniform
except for the month of March.

[LINKS] covers federations, magazines, history, game databases, and
miscellaneous. [INFORMES] has pages about various unrelated topics --
'Pal Benko en el Campeonato Americano (1969/1980)' and 'Miniatures
in Base de Partidas'.

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Let's go back and take a closer look at 1971, the second year covered
by 'Old in Chess' (OIC). The most significant events of the year were
Fischer's victories in candidate matches and Karpov's emergence as
the strongest player of the new generation. This was also the year
that saw the publication of the first FIDE rating list.

OIC lists 37 events for 1971. An obvious question is 'Why these
events?' If another historian were to compile a list of the most
important events of 1971, how would it compare to the OIC list? I
decided to check two other sources covering the same year. The first
source was ChessLab at...

ChessLab : Two million interactive chess games online
http://www.chesslab.com/

...I downloaded all 5646 games for the year 1971, and loaded the PGN
headers into a database for further analysis. The second source was
Chess Records Management (CRM) which I reviewed early last year...

2001 no.3 2001-02-01 UPITT (V; Events); CRM I
http://mark_weeks.tripod.com/chw01d15/2001-03.txt

2001 no.4 2001-02-15 CRM II
http://mark_weeks.tripod.com/chw01d15/2001-04.txt

...Unfortunately, the site and its data has since disappeared. During
the preparation of my articles I built a database from CRM's
extensive index of chess events since the early 1800s. I dug this
database out of my archives and extracted 49 events from 1971. I
matched the OIC list with the CRM list and found 29 events on both
lists. The ChessLab data helped with some of the less obvious
matches; for example, CRM's 'Eskilstuna' was the same as OIC's '43.
SWE-ch' and CRM's 'Tucuman (tt)' was the same as OIC's '01.
Panamericano tt'.

This left 28 events on one list or the other, but not on both -- 20
from CRM's list and 8 from OIC's. Of the events on CRM's list, I was
surprised to discover that the four candidate matches where Fischer
did not participate were missing from OIC. Other events which might
be considered important were Adelaide (won by Portisch), Varna
(Vasiukov), Vrnjacka Banja (Vaganian), Vrsac (Mecking), and perhaps
the first Lone Pine, a Swiss System won by GM Larry Evans. Of the
events on OIC's list missing from CRM, the most important were the
Polish championship (Schmidt), the British championship (Keene), and
the European Team championship.

What makes an event historically important? I admit that I don't have
a good answer to this question. Perhaps it depends on who is asking
and for what purpose.

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This is a site to watch and I hope that Zaiko continues its
development. It's a mixture of chess history, database, and Internet
techniques which transcend language and cultural barriers.

Bye for now,
Mark Weeks

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