ChessBase 8.0 statistics – part two

CHESSBASE STATISTICS -- PART TWO

by Steve Lopez

In last week's ChessBase Workshop we looked at doing some simple statistical overviews of a player's performance using the graphical statistical displays. This week, we'll continue that discussion (so if you missed last week's column, please go back and check it out). You'll recall that we did a search for all of J.R. Capablanca's games as Black in Mega Database 2003, finding 409 games. We'll use that same procedure again to bring up the graphic statistics display.

But this time, we'll click on the radio button next to "ECO C" to get the following display:

This is a statistical display based on the player's results using openings covered in Volume C of the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings. That volume covers all of the double King pawn openings, as well as the French Defense.

Note that the display is in two parts. The lower graph is based on total number of games; in other words, the higher the bar, the more games were played in that opening. The numbers along the left-hand side of the graph (the "y" axis) refer to the number of games. You'll see that only a few of the bars are higher than "10", meaning that these few openings were the ones played more than ten times over the 409 games found in the search. Of particular note is the bar in the vicinity of C50. We can "zoom in" on that part of the display by using the arrow and "plus/minus" keys at the bottom of the display:

After a few "minus" clicks, we get the display pictured above. We can see that it is, indeed, the ECO code C50 that was played more than ten times. It was played eleven times (as shown by the number above the bar).

Let's return to the first display again:

The upper graph shows the percentage of wins for each ECO code but always from White's point of view. Remember that we've done a search for Capa's games as Black, so high bars in this display show areas in which Capa wasn't very successful. For example, code C06 shows a bar going the whole way to the top of the graph. The numbers along the lefthand side are percentages from White's viewpoint, so a bar going the whole way to the top means that White was 100% successful in this opening. If you sort the games found in the search by ECO codes, you'll find that there is just a single C06 game, which Capa lost to Alekhine in the 1938 AVRO tournament.

Since we were looking at Capa's wins as Black, low bars in this display are openings in which Capa was very successful.

The dotted line midway up the graph is the 50% mark, provided as a means of helping you gauge the display. Of course you can again use the buttons at the bottom of the display to zoom in on a particular part of the graph.

There's a whole series of radio buttons on the display, one for each volume of ECO (A through E), plus a "ECO A-E" button which shows the full range of all 500 ECO codes. You'll definitely want to use the "zoom" buttons if you use this display:

There's yet another graphical statistics display available in ChessBase 8, but it's very underutilized (and also a bit hidden). It also requires a lot more exposition to describe, so we'll save that one for the third part of our series next week. Until then, have fun!