new chess games database is out there -www.openingmaster.com

[budfit]

Hi, I am new to this site, but seeing already some well established forum. Well done!

Well, one of the reasons why am I introducing myself (as I am bit shy) is to get our web page bit known among chess players. It has a lot of potential and the project is about to be finished now and the web page just launched.
I am talking about chess opening databases. Our small team has built a quite extensive chess database with no duplicates and with only advanced chess human players. The database started from small, but now grown up into a huge piece of work which we would like to share with others.

please visit http://www.openingmaster.com to see more. Our current version holds 5.2 million games, no duplicates and only quality played only by human professionals. Once you upload it to your computer chess program you will see the difference compared to others.

Best Regards,
Alexander Horvath
Senior International Master, ICCF (ELO 2474)
member of Slovak National Team
Slovakia
http://www.openingmaster.com

[Rolf]

Best Regards,
Alexander Horvath
Senior International Master, ICCF (ELO 2474)
member of Slovak National Team
Slovakia
http://www.openingmaster.com

Hi Mr. Horvath, let me make a proposal for improving the entry modalities of a casual visitor.

I wished that a new visitor could feel and touch a least a small extraction or better example of what you have in your databases.

I mean without the registration process. Why not allowing a short look into this?

Perhaps you'll reply that the visitor's entry is free but after a short registration without payment. Yes, but why should I register, choosing password if I only want to take a look?

In your strict differentiation without visitor allowance you are way behind such offers like chessgames.com from GM Keene. THere yxou can visit and play around with a game, you see almost everything but if you want to download except a singular game you do also register and pay a small fee. Also called Golden Membership or such some.

I would propose that you come to more user friendly practice because now it looks as if you mainly want to sell something nobody has seen, which in itself is a false promise because as you know there are millions of database games on the net for free. Why should a casual chessplayer give you almost 50€ per year for the similar databases?

You get the drift hopefully. To decide if I should pay you I wished I knew a bit more about the content.

Best wishes.

[AdminX]

Best Regards,
Alexander Horvath
Senior International Master, ICCF (ELO 2474)
member of Slovak National Team
Slovakia
http://www.openingmaster.com

Hi Mr. Horvath, let me make a proposal for improving the entry modalities of a casual visitor.

I wished that a new visitor could feel and touch a least a small extraction or better example of what you have in your databases.

I mean without the registration process. Why not allowing a short look into this?

Perhaps you'll reply that the visitor's entry is free but after a short registration without payment. Yes, but why should I register, choosing password if I only want to take a look?

In your strict differentiation without visitor allowance you are way behind such offers like chessgames.com from GM Keene. THere yxou can visit and play around with a game, you see almost everything but if you want to download except a singular game you do also register and pay a small fee. Also called Golden Membership or such some.

I would propose that you come to more user friendly practice because now it looks as if you mainly want to sell something nobody has seen, which in itself is a false promise because as you know there are millions of database games on the net for free. Why should a casual chessplayer give you almost 50€ per year for the similar databases?

You get the drift hopefully. To decide if I should pay you I wished I knew a bit more about the content.

Best wishes.

Nice website, and best of luck to you. I checked out some of your videos, they are pretty good overviews. I do agree with alot of what Rolf has to say. It is some good advice.

[LJC]

I second what Rolf said

[budfit]

Hi Rolf,
I perfectly agree with you, why should a casual visitor need to pay before testing it. You don't. Let me explain you why...
...And in other web sites you can actually play it. Well, to answer that we also offer around 20,000 games for free (without any registration) to see and play via the 3rd party chess viewer. They are from the most recent tournaments. Please check the direct link below to see how it works.
/ http://www.openingmaster.com/index.php? ... eatre.html /

But coming back to free tickets.
in the free or blue membership (after really easy registration process - and yes it's just a little to ask for your ID and password in exchange of the databases) you may download :
OM Grand Master training DB more than 500,000 games
OM Portal DB - collection of more than 300,000 games from portals
OM Collection of Grand Masters play - selection of grand masters and their plays.

you may argue you can download millions of games on INTERNET, yes that is true but look at the quality. It can actually hurt your plays by giving you bad advises. What our mission of the product and service is that we go for quality rather than for quantity. I.e. all games undergo strict selection process, de-duplication, filter etc, before it enters into the DB.
We don't post just ''anything'' . We filter all computer games, nick names from portals (except a special portal DB), games prior 1900, no games without bodies, no game which end before 8th move (irrelevant for any statistics etc..)

The 19 Eur and 39 Eur for membership is little we can ask for for having access to one of the largest quality databases available, updated on monthly basis (i.e. 12x a year), we as much as we would love to provide great services for free to everybody, need to pay for the servers, for the licenses of the programs, for energy and time, so it's really up to each user to decide.
And trust me you don't find on the INTERNET professional databases for free. Look at Mega or Standard from Chess Base. The price for one license (not annual membership) is around 200 USD for the same thing however with worse quality and smaller number of games. / http://www.chessbase.com/shop/productli ... ser=&coin= /
Yes we are aware, that nobody except the central European region heard about us, and we probably cannot compete (yet) with the biggest players on the web, but over the time people will decide.

We decided to use chess forums to inform chess players of the world that this project started and is now ready. I apologize if I used a wrong section or medium to do this. Please don't take it as a Spam but rather a information for players so they can decide from more products.

So far we operated more on the central European forums where we were active, however now decided it's time to share our knowledge on worldwide level as well. So we will contribute with our posts here and there.

Appreciate your point of view.

Best Regards,
Alexander Horvath, SIM ICCF
www.openingmaster.com

[Steve B]

well now i have heard everything
its one thing for people to complain whenever they have to actually PAY for something on the Internet
now there are complaints about free registrations?
we all had to register to post here and on all of the other popular computer chess forums

seems to me this site has alot of hard work behind it and so all that is being asked is for people to register .. for FREE and you can still download 100,000's of games

Give me a break for gods sake regards
Steve

[Rolf]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Now I know much more. And your message isnt spam at all.

I clicked on the given link (where the free 20000 are hidden) and opened the first game subchapter from ARG.

Look how the header of the first game is presented:

[Event "83º Final Campeonato Argentino Superior"]
[Site "La Plata, Bs. As."]
[Date "2008.08.11"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Felgaer, Ruben"]
[Black "Kovalyov, Anton"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "B80"]
[PlyCount "51"]
[EventDate "2008.08.11"]
[Source "Opening Master"]
[SourceDate "2008.08.17"]

I think I can well explain what I meant with the actual situation on the net. You mentioned your big efforts over years and the class for the good players who need best advice. This is all true, but here your argument sucks in the first game of that free zone:

Please take a closer look. Any good player wants to know the round number. But you dont give it. I can tell you why. Because the game wasnt played in the regular tournament at all. It was played in rapid style in a tie. This is important to know.

Here is the same game with a better header in TWIC (for free!):


[Event "83rd ch-ARG Playoff"]
[Site "La Plata ARG"]
[Date "2008.08.11"]
[Round "1"]
[White "Felgaer, Ruben"]
[Black "Kovalyov, A."]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "B80"]
[WhiteElo "2566"]
[BlackElo "2548"]
[PlyCount "51"]
[EventDate "2008.08.11"]
[EventType "tourn (rapid)"]
[EventRounds "6"]
[EventCountry "ARG"]
[EventCategory "13"]
[Source "Mark Crowther"]
[SourceDate "2008.08.18"]


Look at this and compare. You gave no correct Event type, no round number, no Elo etc.

So that I must conclude that this is a premature attempt to present games to the professional or amateur player with a higher interest in quality of the game presentation.

Sorry that I have found this state already in the first game I opened right on top of the free section.

Now this is what I meant. I could take a look and for the moment I simply cant believe you that you have successfully done your homework to then offer a fair deal to the interested player.

PLEASE dont take this wrong. I have no motivation to nitpick on you. But I believe in such forms of feedback and I am happy that I could give you for free.

Again I wish you all the best for the future and your database idea.

[budfit]

thanks Rolf,
you actually picked a wrong example. The chess theater with this 20,000 games is totally different to what we offer with our OM databases. This is where you should examine (please register for free and download the sample databases to compare)
The games which you re-play online is more for educational purposes then downloading or using it as a ''database''. And yes many of the headers could be incorrect, this we didn't check as it is meant really only for educational purposes and is for free (even without registering).

For databases purposes we would rather offer you the download section (under Blue membership / free ) where you can pick free databases and examine them.

Right now, we are working on completing the sample database ''Orangutan'' which we will upload in any minute for free as well.

Again, much appreciated your point of view, and you have full right to be skeptical. We need to convince also such players like you as nobody these days just ''trust'' but rather cross-check. So you gave us good idea, that we will post more samples for people who would want to examine deeply the quality inside.

Alexander Horvath
SIM ICCF
www.openingmaster.com

[Rolf]

Hi Alexander, I must admit that I wasnt without prejudice after I've read that you already had put your OM database into the Rybka package, know why?

Ok, for whatever it's worth. Last year I bought Rybka 2.3.2a with other exe(s) and opening books and a database as well.

Of course I was eager to integrate the games into my own big one. But alas what could I see? Many mistakes, many doubles and so on. So, clearly a real scandal if you consider that this was offered altogether with the best engine on this Earth.

So, I already had this feeling or prejudice, when I opened your database. Honestly I couldnt believe that there existed a second so well harmonized database than the CB one which relies on TWIC BTW to great extents. Who should invest so much time only to then sell the same database but without copying the one from CB? I also remember the many games I got from this Hungarian IM who died in the meantime. He collected everything, ripped off the exact headers and commentaries and then offered the rest for free. Long time ago Ed Schroder offered a Mega base with Informator games but without the magnificent comments selfunderstood. IMO this is all kuddelmuddel.

You have only a single chnce to survive on this wild jungle market. Adopt Rolf as advisor for the meta problems of your chess business. In that sense I wish you again all the best.

[budfit]

HI Rolf again,

it is very nice you are interested to confirm or reject your initial thinking and thanks for the registration (even free). We are right now uploading the entire A00 Irregular Openings /Orangutan-Sokolsky and other openings within the A00. It's 52,000 games altogether. Not much one may say, but very CONTROVERSIAL. It is part of the Opening Master released for free for people like you non-believers.

In regards to Rybka. Well, this is so far the best engine ever lived BUT (there is always but) it is not easy to configure. I agree the 3.0 had problems and could imagine few people getting heart attacks. This was very well listened by Convekta people and the new update 3.05 is working just fine. Give it a try once more.
However the latest release of CB 10, now this is a scandal so many bugs we found inside, that really we are considering to stick with CB 9 for a while which works great.

To explain the story about Rybka DB, perhaps you misunderstood our intention. The data / games which we had under CB, were manually migrated into Rybka environment. We don't sell it separately or as a different thing, it is just alternative for somebody who prefers Rybka environment. Nothing more. And since you have the year membership you don't need to worry about whether it's Rybka or CB, you just download everything.

The Opening Master is unique collection of quality selected games registered in European Union (so far) as a database package. There is no copyright on individual games. You may view it for each possible angle.

Best Regards,
Alexander Horvath, SIM ICCF
www.openingmaster.com

PS. Thanks for the offer of reviewing meta problems of the Opening Master chess business, much appreciated. Can you send us via this post or private message your credentials (e.g. ELO, rankings, organization/association/tournaments etc...) you are definitely very active member of this forum but that is what we know so far about you...