PART 1 • Why you need a chess database
find it in a book. In the two hours it took that second guy just to find fifty Caro-Kann Advance games, I can find many more than that, and play through a couple of dozen of them.
In the limited time you have available for chess study, which would you rather do? You could spend an hour looking through books to find a few games you ' d like to play. Once you find some, you can then set up a physical chess board to play through them. Whoops, that first game has some variations included – time to go find a pocket set so you can play out the variations without losing your place in the main game. Oh, and you ' ll need to set up a new board position on that pocket set each time you play over a new variation. Three hours have passed and you ' ve played through maybe a half-dozen games.
Or you could search a chess database for those same games and find them in seconds. You could play through the same half-dozen games, right on your computer screen, including any variations, jumping back to the main game or to another variation at the click of a mouse, automatically resetting the board each time in the blink of an eye, and do it in less than a half-hour ' s study time. You ' ve now learned the same things, but in a fraction of the time, leaving you an extra two and a half hours for further study( or to do something else entirely, like watch a movie).
Using a chess database buys you time. You can become a more accomplished player in less time using a database than you ever could without using one. And reviewing the games of other players is an important part of every player ' s chess development( as we saw in Chapter Three); it ' s so much easier to not only find games, but find suitable ones which match your study program( like all of Tal ' s world championship games, or Kasparov ' s King ' s Indian Defenses). The possibilities are nearly limitless, so much so that a list of tips and advice for using a large chess database could easily be the subject of a separate book.
No, you won ' t play through all five million games in a chess database, any more than you ' ll read every book at your local library. But just as your local library exists to provide you with the books and information you want and need, so does your chess database similarly exist as a library to provide you with chess games to replay, study, and enjoy.
As I said way back at the start of this book, there ' s never been a better time to be a chess player because of all of these wonderful electronic tools that are now available. In part two of this book, we ' ll look at how to use the specific features of one of them – a great playing, analysis, and training program called Chess King.
125 chessking. com