🔥 FREE! MASSIVE Chess database! Get LumbrasGigabase with 13 million games | Chess Chats #6

#chesschats #chesstools #software #lumbrasgigabase 

With writing my new book, I needed to do some research on historical games, especially some of the chess masters of the Romantic era from the 18th and 19th centuries. Although both chess.com and Lichess both of databases of master games, neither are particularly comprehensive, especially of pre-20th century games.

I contemplated buying ChessBase and their database, but was unconvinced of the value of sinking hundreds of euros into the product given my very narrow use case. There are a number of online website based databases, but most require a subscription fee, and again, none seemed especially comprehensive.

This was when serendipity struck and I discovered a post by @Lumbra74 (Michael Jansen) on the chess.com forum announcing that he was creating a new free database. At the time of publication of this article and video, this was literally only three weeks ago!

LumbrasGigaBase is in the Scid vs PC database format, and is free to download from his website. If you're not familiar, Scid vs PC is a fantastic piece of free chess software for Windows and MacOS. Prior to learning about LumbrasGigaBase, I was already a long-time fan of Scid vs PC; I use it as a client for running Stockfish 16 when undertaking deeper analyses than what  is available on chess.com's analytic engine.

At the time of this article, LumbrasGigaBase has over 13 million games and almost 600,000 players in its database. Amazing! In the video, I do a quick demonstration of searching via an exact position. The really cool feature of Scid vs PC is that you can also search for games similar to the current position as well!

Go check it out, and buy @Lumbra74 a coffee if you enjoy his work!

LumbrasGigaBase: https://lumbrasgigabase.com/
Scid vs PC: https://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/