THE LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS
I've seen chess database users make another kind of mistake (more than
once) when they're thinking that they have to fill in all of the search terms
a program provides. A related mistake is when a user thinks that the more
information you put into your search, the more information you get back;
in fact, just the opposite is true.
I call it The Law of Diminishing Returns. The more search fields you fill
in, the more specific you're making the search – and you'll get back less
information as a result.
Here's an example using Chess King's GigaKing database. I can do a
search for the games of Mikhail Tal and get 2,226 “hits” (games from the
database). When I add a new criterion to the search by specifying his
games as White, I get fewer hits: 1,417 games.
I'll narrow this down more by looking for games he played as White
against Mikhail Botvinnik; I get twenty-three games back from the
GigaKing database. If I add a year to this, say 1960, I get eleven games.
And if I add a range of ECO codes (C00-C99, for the whole of Volume
C of ECO), I get just one game – the first game of their 1960 World
Championship match.
So don't go crazy with the search terms. Just ask for the bare minimum
that describes what you're looking for; if you wind up with too many hits
(thousands of games), you can always narrow it down a bit at that time
by adding additional search terms.
WHY YOU NEED A CHESS DATABASE
Players who have never used a database are always asking me why they
would want one. “What's the advantage of using a database?”
The fact is that nearly every player is already using a database, only they
don't know it. That shelf full of chess books? That's a database. And I wish
I had a dollar for every time I heard something like, “I was digging around
last night trying to find Anderssen's 'Evergreen Game' so I could replay
it – it took me a half-hour to find it”, or “I went through twenty volumes of
the Informant and a few NIC Yearbooks last night looking for Caro-Kann
Advance Variation games. It took me two hours, but I found about fifty
of them. I couldn't decide which ones to play, so I said the heck with it!”
Using a chess database, I can find Anderssen's “Evergreen Game” and
play through it on my computer screen in less time than it takes you to
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