Stephen Ham wrote:OK, so Vishy has quantity, but does he have equivalent quality. I don't think that's possible.
Amassing all the "quality" OTB, correspondence, engine, and centaur chess games will surely produce a figure of no more than three million, and probably quite a lot less.
I don't know that this is entirely true. Of course, it is quite hard to eliminate all games considered weak or the like. If you reduce a database to only master games then yes, there is no question you will have a LOT less than 3 million. Still, is it that simple? If you want to prepare in a detailed way against an opponent, it can be interesting to see the player's games when they were young and how and what they played. For an instructor, those thousands of national youth championship games of sub-12 players is a real boon, whereas to a player like Gelfand, it would be useless waste. Who is to say what is valuable or not?
Even pure correspondence game databases such as UltraCorr2 by Tim Harding are already approaching the magic million number, where you will find many rare resources including many postal games by the likes of Alekhine or Keres, which you may not find elsewhere.
Albert