Dann, John, Rolf
where to start, firstly I would thank you all for your deep analysis and posts into this subject. A special note to Rolf, I do accept criticism, actually I love it as it moves things forward and you learn from it. I am getting used to your psychological point of view by know, (it took me some time but I don't give up on you don't worry) You misunderstood my message to John when I was asking for clarifications) to support his statements. As you know without these clarifications it is simple accusation and there were too many questions in the air. (perhaps I used more aggressive tone for which I apologize) One thing he did good, he analyzed it and made an effort to write a feedback on this. (even though it was negative and hurting our quality claims - but this is why we are all here, to prove or reject the theories by SUPPORTING FACTS - note the capital letters.)
One quote from Rolf :
So again here you claim quality games collection but it's not. Dann made the relevent arguments. The worst that you could do is announcing the collection as Orang Utan but in truth you present the whole INFOMATOR content of A00. Alexander, also this is a bis mistake because you are not aware of the tradition in INF which is in itself absolutely fine but which makes confusion if you lose context with the INF key. In that key someone who is familiar with has no problems to be orientated well, but without that context the key separation is confusing.
yes, we and I still claim the Opening Master has the highest quality standards but as we just learnt only for certain types of players. The subject of the post is called A00 - Irregular Openings / Orangutan - Sokolsky. Now as I wrote already, I announced all A00 including the ''eye catcher" Orangutan-Sokolsky which we all know is bit controversial so I very well know the INFORMATOR content and the entire A00. On the ChessBase usage:... well, I can only say that I have been using it for more than 6 years and can say that I can spot the difference between the various setups if not all. And yes, I agree , if you don't know what you are doing with the thing rather then don't do it, because you may come up with different answers every time you run it (with slight change in your settings)
OK, seems like we are going to the defense mode, but I just felt I had to explain few general things.
Now let's get back to the FACTS (bit offense play). If you are using any DOS program or export/extract as a PGN and then wash it in some 3rd party program, sorry but here I have a right to say, we don't guarantee the results anymore. By doing this you can just mess up things very badly. For simple statements like "CB is wrong", I would appreciate to provide some proof of the duplicates so we can see if CB is making mistakes in running the checks or where could be the error. (and yes we can admit the mistakes on our side but only once we see some tangible proofs)
Talking about the beloved headings. Now I mentioned this I think before, it all depends for what you want to use the database for :
1) analysis of chess games from the beginning until the end with clear results. (hopefully the end is not in the first 8 moves as this can only happen when an amateur is playing with the GM)
2) library with nice headings and collection of good looking names with perfect dates and games without bodies (only results)
we chose 1) and therefore we still consider any of the incorrect headers as irrelevant to the point of ANALYSIS of the games. But as you see, there are different players in the world and not always all share our pragmatic approach....
Now I see big fans of Chess Base Mega. That is just fine, I don't say they are bad they just use different strategy then us. We went for the analysis of the games, i.e. option #1...
Just for the sake of comparing things around, I would really recommend Dann and John to look at the CB Mega and their A00 with 69.740 games
1/ games without bodies = 43.718. Now you can analyze this
2/ games 1-7 moves = only 947 but you can deeply analyze these games
3) loads of ''BYE'' games. Have you lost to ''BYE'' recently? Well according to Mega many players did.
3/ thus running just a short comparable games Mega 08 = 25.075 in total
this is just a sample of one of the highest quality databases but of course the rest of the ECOs could be just in perfect shape. (I don't comment on this as with all the respect and effort the guys behind CB done through out the years, they have our full admiration as we know how painful it is to collect things but somebody should also clean up in the house too)
ok, it's 1 AM here, wish I could stay longer, tomorrow I will provide more analysis to confirm our statements. And again, it is very appreciated from all of you guys of raising your comments here and challenge our statements of quality. Rolf must know better - when I see his Avatar - it's all subject of relativity...
Best Regards
Alexander Horvath
SIM ICCF
http://www.openingmaster.com
