Winning starts with what you know
The new version 18 offers completely new possibilities for chess training and analysis: playing style analysis, search for strategic themes, access to 6 billion Lichess games, player preparation by matching Lichess games, download Chess.com games with built-in API, built-in cloud engine and much more.
When purchasing a database with the lofty name 'Mega' Database, you expect content that is best described in extremes, and rest assured it lives up to its name and reputation.
The number is hard to grasp. After all, even the most devout competitive players will play at most a couple of thousand games in their careers on average, so how do you fit in millions? The fact is that chess has sped up the number of games and material available over the years, thanks to the internet. On average, hundreds of thousands games are being added each year, from modest amateur competitions and chess leagues, to the elite events we all follow and admire throughout the year.
However, not only are the year's games included, but also newly uncovered games found in nearly forgotten chess books, magazines and more. That is how even players long dead such as Alekhine or Botvinnik still see their number of games increase over the years.
This number too is hard to get one's head around. After all, even large collections of commented games rarely include more than 100 games in a single hefty volume, and here it is basically saying there are 685 of those hefty volumes.
On the left you can see the list of annotators, listed by order of the most commented games.
On the right is the list of games commented by Radjabov, and whose games they were. For
example, Anand has in excess of 200 self-commented names, Kasparov has nearly 60, etc.
How good and interesting are they? They are all relevant, and it depends. You will find rare masterpieces commented by modern grandmasters, as well as including notes found in sources of the time. That is how you will find snippets from Lasker, comments by Capablanca, and many more, and of course the top players of today.
Each year, ChessBase Magazine publishes games played and commented by the very best players in the world, including Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Vishy Anand (whose commented games in Mega number the hundreds), Vladimir Kramnik, and so many more. Each year those commented games are added to the next edition of Mega Database.
Here is a game, chosen fairly randomly (it needed to be a top player), to give you an idea on what to expect:
This is more than a gimmick, this is a luxury, and a record of a player's career. Take Boris Spassky for example, a player with a long career, and Vlastimil Hort, another fixture of the second half of the 20th century.
Pulling up a game from 1962 between the two from the world U26 championship
shows a very young Hort, aged 18 (note the ages in parentheses) and Spassky
who is 25. Suppose we roll the clock forward to... 1975.
Now we see an adult Hort, 31 years old (again, note the age in parentheses)
facing a 38-year-old Boris Spassky. The pictures have changed to reflect this.
Finally we leap forward in time to 1999 where we have a graying Hort, 55, and
Spassky, silver haired and 62
Certainly the pictures cannot be considered essential to studying, but putting a face to the player is certainly pleasant, and reminds us there was a person behind those moves, struggling and competing. In fact, even when there are no photos to go by, such as the great Philidor, images depicting him are used instead.
If you own Mega 2016, or a previous edition, and do not see the player photos,
open a game from Mega and in the View tab put a check in Players Photos
When evaluating the price of Mega Database, it bears mentioning that included in the package is a subscription to the ChessBase update system. This alone is a 49 Euro value in and of itself. In a nutshell, using ChessBase program, you receive a serial number that allows you to update the database with the latest games of the week, thousands of games, and all with the same standard of names of players and events. Anyone who recalls the databases years back with half a dozen Korchnois, all with different spellings, to cite but one example, can appreciate the importance of this.
This subscription not only will start as of the week Mega was finalized, meaning you will not miss games played in November and December 2015, but will continue throughout the entire year of 2016.
