Appeal to type up your Canadian Open games in PGN

[Kenneth Regan]

Dear Chess Friends in Canada:

With the blessing of Canadian Open organizer David Cohen, and Hugh Brodie of CANbase (http://canbase.fqechecs.qc.ca/canbaseii.htm), I'm appealing for fellow players to type in their games in PGN format, and send the game files to David at 2011CanadianOpen AT canadianchess.info (substitute @ sign for AT---note this was the correspondence e-mail for the tournament itself).

To date we have 339 games from the Open section and some games from the others, including all games of all players with 6.0 or better in the Open. You may look up those files to see which of your games we already have at

http://www.canadianchess.info/2011canadianopen/results


Why the appeal? For one, David and Hugh were going to take months to enter as many games by hand as they could muster---already David has done forty and it's as much as CANbase had last year. But a little effort from you will save them a lot of time and trouble!

For two, I would like please to make this my first "Intrinsic Ratings" run of an entire large Swiss tournament. Some spot-runs since the event suggest that my model's results will be faithful to players' FIDE ratings (by which it is calibrated), and distributional tests indicate that my model is reflecting over 85% of chess skill. I have Rybka 3 already whirring away on the top 28 finishers' games, in 50-PV mode which no other chess study has done. This research has recently been featured on the social-science blogs "Marginal Revolution" and "Freakonomics":

http://marginalrevolution.com/margin...over-time.html
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/...tter-at-chess/

plus Susan Polgar published my Canadian Open report at

http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2011...ken-regan.html

Finally my "Fidelity" anti-cheating website is http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/ Let me hasten to add that my work has more-general positive uses: for player training, indexing chess ratings to the same standard, effect of tournament conditions and time controls, historical comparisons, and perhaps more. My professional website as a computer scientist (Associate Professor, University at Buffalo (SUNY)) is http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/ and also has materials of general interest, plus I co-manage one of the major Math/CS blogs at http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/

A followup post in this thread will give particular tips and directions for PGN game entry. Please also pass on this request.

Sincerely and thanks,
your fellow competitor IM Ken Regan (in Buffalo)

[Kenneth Regan]

Re: Appeal to type up your Canadian Open games in PGN --- directions & tips

If you don't own Monroi or Chessbase or Fritz or some other GUI for entering chess games, you may enter the games with the free Arena (3.0 or earlier) chess GUI, which is downloadable at http://www.playwitharena.com/ for Windows or Linux/WINE. Macintosh owners may use SigmaChess for Macintosh (http://www.sigmachess.com/).

Please enter game data conforming as much as possible to the following example header---note the event's official title for all three sections:

[Event "Pinnacle 48th CAN Op Ch"]
[Site "Toronto, CAN"]
[EventDate "2011.07.09"]
[Date "2011.07.09"]
[Round "1"]
[White "Song, Eric"]
[Black "Armstrong, Robert"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[ECO "B08"]
[WhiteElo "1488"]
[BlackElo "1740"]
[PlyCount "71"]
[Source "Armstrong"]
[Section "Under 2000"]

Your GUI will likely not allow entering the last two items, or may call the former "Annotator"; OK then to omit them, or edit the file with, say, Notepad++ or Wordpad (in which case be sure to leave a blank line before the moves themselves---beware Notepad may jam lines together).

Tips specific to Arena:

• Click the "Edit" button to the right of the diagram before entering any moves.
• You may ignore time data that Arena puts after each move shown in the box---it won't show in the PGN file.
• You must select "Game" then Game data to enter the player, event, date etc. header information, before saving.
• Also unlike ChessBase/Fritz, Arena seems not to facilitate a "Replace Game" option---please choose "PGN" then Open or use a text editor to check for and delete multiple copies of a game.

Please send completed file to David Cohen at 2011CanadianOpen AT canadianchess.info, which was the general "Contact" e-mail on the tournament website http://www.canadianchess.info/2011canadianopen/ And again thanks to him and the whole organizational staff and sponsors for a truly memorable and fun chess experience.

Thanks again to y'all too, ---Dr. Kenneth W. Regan

[Jean Hébert]

Re: Appeal to type up your Canadian Open games in PGN

With the blessing of Canadian Open organizer David Cohen, and Hugh Brodie of CANbase (http://canbase.fqechecs.qc.ca/canbaseii.htm), I'm appealing for fellow players to type in their games in PGN format, and send the game files to David at 2011CanadianOpen AT canadianchess.info (substitute @ sign for AT---note this was the correspondence e-mail for the tournament itself).

Hopefully this appeal will meet with some success, but individually players often have little incentive to have their games preserved for others to see WHEN they are not assured in return to see their opponents games!

Once again it shows the need to provide carbon copies scoresheets on all boards at all times in the first place if games are to be preserved.

Nonetheless having already 339 games from the Open section is not bad (this is far better than the famous Cappelle-la-Grande Open, for example) but a simple glance shows that dozens of games from strong players are missing (Milicevic, Day, Yoos, Plotkin, Kleiman, Melekhina, etc.), almost all games from strong canadian female players, almost all games from promising young players (Jason Cao for example), etc. This is very unfortunate and there is only one way to end it : carbon copies on all boards for everyone!
Many much larger Opens around the world manage to preserve every single of their games (at least the early part of each one). There is no reason not to succeed in doing so for our "small" opens.

[Hugh Brodie]

Re: Appeal to type up your Canadian Open games in PGN

I will be receiving all the CO games in the near future, so eventually almost all the Open section games will be available to the outside world (as well as a number of games in the U2000 and U1600 sections). I think the appeal for games is aimed at the lower sections, since (almost) all of the Open section games are/will be available.

I am still disappointed that the organizers of the CYCC did not take up my offer to enter those games, as I have done for the last several years.

[Kenneth Regan]

Re: Appeal to type up your Canadian Open games in PGN

Dear Hugh (and Jean),
My intent is that people, yes in the Open section, by entering their games manually can save you trouble. On my part, having basically all the games would eliminate the "selection bias" of having complete sets of games only from players who did the best. Anyway to answer Jean, it sure looked to me like the carbon-copy scoresheets (or Monrois) were used on every board in most of the room... Thanks again for your collating efforts; if my work proves out then there will be something especially constructive to do with all those games.

---Ken R.