ChessBase Magazine 96

Main Chess Database

The ChessBase Magazine 96 database appears as an icon labeled “96 CBM” in the main database window of ChessBase 9.0. Double-clicking the icon will produce a list of 1,722 entries. Of these 1,719 are games, the remaining three are database texts, which you can see at the top of the list.

You can browse through this list of games, but it is better to click one of the tabs at the top to get a different overview. The most important tab here is “Tournament”. When you click it you get a list of the different tournaments included in this issue. If you right-click the list you can sort the tournaments according to name, place, nation, date, category, etc. “Category” sorts the strongest tournaments to the top.

Another way to access the games is by clicking on “Players”. Right near the top you will find the most successful of the bunch, Vishy Anand, who won the super-tournament in Wijk aan Zee. If you right-click his name and select “Statistics” you will get a display you may not have seen before.

The Chess Tournaments

The biggest tournament by far on this CD is the European Championship in Istanbul. No less than 164 grandmasters were participating, and 1,347 games were played. Of these 355 have been annotated for ChessBase Magazine 96. Many of the players were trying to qualify for the world championship. The tournament was won, with 9.5/13 points, by GM Zurab Azmaiparashvili, but we would recommend studying the games of the silver medal winner, Vladimir Malakhov. The 22-year-old Moscow GM is playing exciting chess and quickly approaching the magic 2700 mark.

Incidentally, for anyone who missed it, there was a big multimedia report on the European Championship in the previous issue of ChessBase Magazine.

Enghein les Bains is the highest category tournament on the CD, with an Elo average of 2669 (= Cat. 17). It was won by Evgeny Bareev with 6.5/9 and a 2832 performance. The wry-witted Russian GM is now listed with a rating of 2739 at number four in the world rankings.

The category 16 Sarajevo Bosnia tournament was won by Ivan Sokolov, who scored 6.5/9 with a performance of 2801. Alexei Shirov is to be found half a point lower, while Bareev had a disappointing 2625 performance and ended in seventh place.

The category 15 North Sea Cup in Esbjerg saw a three-way tie between the youngsters Luke McShane and Krishnan Sasikiran – and Alexey Dreev, who scored 3.5 points in the last four rounds to catch up with them.

Chess Database Theme Key

The ChessBase Magazine CD contains a theme key which you should explore, in order to get a completely different look at the games in the main database. Click “General themes” on the top of the games list to get to the theme key.

Try double-clicking “Brilliant moves”. This gives you a list of games in which an annotator gave a move a double exclamation mark. Load the first game and the program will jump to the position just before the brilliant move. This allows you to try and find it yourself. Press F10 to load the next game. Ctrl-F10 loads the previous one. In each case the program jumps to the critical position.

How do the theme keys work? To understand this we have to take a look at keys in general and the ChessBase search mask. The latter offers you a flexible method of searching through a database using a very large number of search criteria. On the other hand there are the so-called “keys” (openings, players, endgame, etc.) which give you access to material that has been pre-classified. Keys have the advantage of being virtually instantaneous.

The theme key combines both methods. A key is defined by the contents of the search mask, and this definition is permanently stored with the key. So the key can be used to classify new games or even a completely different database.

If you right-click an entry in a theme key and select Edit (F2) you will get the search mask that defines the key. You can change it to modify the criteria for games to be classified into that key. If you load a game from a theme key the program will jump to the position that led to the match (if that is possible).

You can use the new theme key supplied with CBM 96 to classify other game collections as well. This is how you apply the key to a different database: Double-click the database to list the contents. Click on the “General themes” tab at the top of the list. Since there is presumably no key present you will get a dialog with four options.

Click on the “Select a key” button.

In the file selector that appears search for the theme key (96CBM.ckn) on the CBM 96 CD. The key will be copied and the games of the database will be automatically classified.