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Mega Database - Player Dossier

It's the kind of thing that can happen to any chess player. You wake up in the middle of the night, sweating profusely. Tomorrow you have a critical game, against some player you know absolutely zilch about. Just that his name is "Ponomar"-something, and he is pretty strong. Panic, what to do?

Good news: in that terrifying situation you are just three clicks and 50 seconds away from a satisfactory solution. Here is how you go about it:

Fire up ChessBase on your computer. You will need ChessBase 7.0 or better still Version 8.0 to perform the magic we are about to see.

Mega Database should be defined as your "reference database". This will normal be the case – it simply tells ChessBase that unless otherwise instructed it should always consult Mega 2004 when you ask it a question.

Click "Search player" in the "Edit" menu (or press Ctrl-F2).

In the dialog that appears start typing in the player's name. Note that after five letters ChessBase will already retrieve all names that begin with those letters. Chances are you will recognize the player you need in the list (he is how strong??).

Double-click the player (or click "Details"). Select "Dossier". You can simply click OK or set some of the parameters. We will choose "Medium" for the repertoire analysis, allow four photos and include career highlights.

Data Mining

Now you will require some patience – about 50 seconds of it on a regular last-generation computer (800 MHz). You should know that ChessBase is not retrieving a file, it is engaged in something that is known as "data mining". It is actually going through the two million games of Mega 2004 in order to generate its report on Ponomariov. This had the disadvantage that it is not instantaneous (but, hey, what is 50 seconds among friends?). On the other hand it works equally well for any player in the database – for Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand and Co., but also for Joe Schlubb who plays in opens all over the country.

ChessBase wasting 50 seconds of your time going through
two million games to profile Ruslan Ponomariov

Okay, the 50 seconds have passed, the results appear. Naturally we are not able show you everything here, just as it is presented by ChessBase. For instance wherever a set of games is mentioned (in green), this links to the actual games in the database. Clicking the link will take you to these games, which you can load and replay on the ChessBase screen. Clicking Esc always gets you back to the report. ChessBase also generates repertoire trees of the player, allowing you to play through his entire white and black repertoire, viewing full statistics for every move he has played.

Well here's the report as generated by ChessBase using Mega Database. It was converted to HTML by ChessBase 8.0. Some editorial remarks have been added (in red) to draw attention to functions not available in a simple Internet browser.

People who bought Mega Database also bought:

Fritz 8
Deep Fritz 8
ChessBase 8.0 Starter Pack

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