Thursday, April 17, 2008

PGNMentor.com PGN Library

PGN Mentor is a program "for working with PGN files", but that's not what I am going to talk about here. I didn't try that program, and after a trial you need to order it.

But on their website, they have a huge database of PGN files of various Players, Openings and Events.

  1. The PGN files with specific players' games are classified in alphabetical order (the first one being Michael Adams and the last one, Vadim Zvjaginsev).
  2. The PGN files classified by openings are tremendously useful, and they seem to cover virtually all possible openings. They are classified based on the first moves, thus the 5 categories: Modern Queen Pawn (1. d4), Classical Queen Pawn (1. d4 d5), Modern King Pawn (a.k.a. semi-open games; 1. e4), Classical King Pawn (1. e4 e5), and Flank and Unorthodox.
  3. The PGN files classified by the type of events offer three choices: Tournaments (from 1851 to 2007 (!)), Candidates and Interzonals (from 1948 to 2007), and World Championships (1886-2007).

What's incredibly impressive is the large amout of games in each PGN. For instance, Kasparov.pgn has 1968 games, while SicilianGrandPrix.pgn contains 6616 games!

So here's the address to the page with all the PGN files: http://www.pgnmentor.com/files.html; and this is the address of the PGN Mentor website, where you can download their software: http://www.pgnmentor.com/.

Have fun!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

nice... that goes right into my bookmarks!