Chess Tablebase

Hey, does anyone know where I can find a tablebase for chess? It occured to me that one simple way to master the game would be to just memorize all the possible positions and learn the best move in each of them. I know this sounds ambitious as there are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of positions, but I have a very good memory, so I have no doubt that I will be able to do it with some effort. I'm extremely dedicated, so I don't care if it takes 2 days or 2 months. Thanks for your help!

Oh, also, if it is sufficiently compressed to allow for it to fit on my 2 GB flash drive that would be very helpful!

Are you talking about an opening book database or an endgame tablebase? Either way, I seriously doubt that any human could memorize all possible positions. There are just too many.

Probably an opening database. It seems unlikely that an endgame tablebase would have all possible chess positions.

http://www.shredderchess.com/online-chess/online-databases/endgame-database.html

It's an endgame tablebase, and there is also a quite big opening database. However, I'll warn you:

There are more possible positions in chess than there are atoms in the universe.

Learning key positions is a great way to improve your chess.

Openings: ¨Mastering the _______ with the read and play method¨. It's a serie which is fantastic. It's old, but it doesn't give you variations, it gives typical ideas and tactics.

Endgames: ¨100 endgames you must know¨ or something like that. It's quite good.

Middlegame: Silmans: ¨How to reassess your chess¨, or just by analysing thousands of GM games. Particulary old ones. The book is the easiest, the second is the most rewarding (but most time-comsuming, since computers is NOT ALLOWED).

After one move each there's 400 possible positions. After two moves each there are 71,852 possible board positions. After 3 moves aproximately 9 million possible positions. After 4 moves each there are more than 315 billion possible positions. Therefore it's quite impossible for anyone to memorize possible board positions in chess. The total number of possible positions in a game of chess is larger than the number of electrons in the observable universe. Good luck memorizing that. :)

As Spiritbro77 mentioned, the number of possible opening moves is staggering. Any opening book database is only going to include the good moves, and your opponent can quickly take you out of book by playing a bad move.

Anyway, you'd need to mention the book format (i.e., whether it will be used in Arena, Chessbase, Shredder, etc.). For example, one of the larger opening books for Arena is the Kingliveson book, which has over 23 million positions:  http://chess.cygnitec.com/book/

I don't know how many lifetimes you'd need to memorize them all, but that's your problem. Oh yeah, and once you got to the end of your memorized knowledge and entered the middlegame, you'd still need to play chess.

If this thread is a joke, it's pretty funny.

If it's not a joke, it's even funnier.

I considered the possibility of it being a troll thread, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. It's possible that he just didn't realize how large the databases can get. (We all have to start somewhere with our learning.)

Memorizing 1000's of positions is hard enough (impossible for me), but it's a piece of cake compared to recalling them during a game.  Chess Life recently had an article about this and gave a few examples of GMs, who, after reaching a position that they had extensively analyzed, could not remember the next move.

So there are a lot of positions apparently. More than I thought... But of them probably have an obvious continuation. For example, always put the king in check when possible, always capture the queen when you can ect. So there are probably a lot less positions that aren't as easy to figure out OTB (for example, when you can either put the king in check OR capture the queen). Are there any databases that only have the hard spots?

I would suggest looking at "101 Chess Endgame Tips" by Giddens to get an idea of how daunting your task is.

I was told that I could easily learn these (the person who told me this likes to make people think that he can do things that they can't).  After four years, I know about 15 to 20.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there aren't any databases like that out there, because it's not really that simple. You don't always put the king in check, and you don't always capture the queen. There are always exceptions to the guidelines. It really boils down to the specific position, factoring in either positional considerations or concrete calculations.