The Basics of Chess Databases

by Steve Lopez

This ChessCentral article will give you the basic information you need to understand databases, copying games, and distributing chess lessons in database form. There is a particular skill set which chess instructors ought to have when working in the electronic medium. Nobody is expecting you to become a chess computer guru, but you do require a bit of knowledge to be able to best use these electronic tools. We'll keep this discussion as painless and non-technical as we can; if you'd like additional specific details, please consult your ChessBase documentation (such as the context-sensitive Help file).

A chess database is simply a collection of games. A database might contain literally millions of games or it might simply be a half-dozen games which your student should review - the basic concept of a "database" remains the same either way.

A basic skill which you'll need as a chess teacher is the ability to create new databases. You can then add games to them (manually or by copying games from a second database), but the first step is to create a new database.

In ChessBase you'll do this in the main database desktop (the window which display icons for your databases). Go to the File menu, select "New" and then "Database" from the submenu. The standard Windows File Select dialogue appears, which allows you to select a folder into which to save your database, as well as name the database's main file. After you've done this and clicked "OK" you'll see a new database icon appear on your ChessBase desktop. You can right-click on this icon, select "Properties", and change the appearance of the icon by selecting a new picture for it.

If you double-click this database's icon it will open the game list. Of course, this will presently be empty ("No games found"). You'll correct this deficiency by adding games to the database.

After you've created a new database, there are two ways to get games into it: copy games from a different database, or manually enter games yourself.

Let's look at copying a single game. You open the game list for your "master" database (or any other that has games in it), highlight that game in the game list, right-click on it, select "Edit", and then select "Copy". Use the "ChessBase" button on your Windows Taskbar to bring the database desktop back to the top, right-click on the database into which you want the game to be copied, select "Edit", and then "Paste". A new dialogue will ask you to confirm this operation; just click "Yes" to copy the game.

Note that copying a game from one database to another doesn't remove the game from the original database; you're not moving the game from one base to another, you're just making a copy of it in the new database.

If you want to copy multiple games from one database to another, you'll still need to highlight them first. If the games are consecutive in the game list, you can single-click the first one to highlight it, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard, and then use the down cursor (down arrow) key to highlight the rest. Then right-click on any of them, select "Edit", then "Copy" and follow the same instructions as before.

If the games you wish to copy don't appear consecutively in the game list you can hold down the CTRL key and single-click your selections individually to highlight them, after which you can follow the same instructions as above.

Adding a game to an existing database is pretty easy. Open that database by double-clicking its icon on the ChessBase desktop. Next you'll open a new game window using one of three methods:

1) Go to the toolbar at the top of the game list window and click the button which looks like a black-and-white chessboard;
2) Go to the File menu, select "New", and then the command "Board" from the submenu;
3) Hit CTRL-N on your keyboard.

Whichever method you choose, a new window will open with a chessboard on it. You can move the pieces around on the board to enter game moves (which will appear in the Notation pane). You can enter annotations if you wish (which will be the topic of a separate article; you can also consult your ChessBase Help file for more information). When you finish, go to the File menu and look for the command which reads "Save" followed by the name of the database you opened on the desktop. Click this command to get the "Save Game" dialogue: