Opening Master
Wednesday, September 2, 2015: Products for review
What is Opening Master?
Opening Master is the biggest database of chess games played OTB or correspondence. Its latest version includes more than 6.5 million OTB games and 1.5 million correspondence games. It also separately processes games played by players with pseudonyms on various chess servers. Opening Master has been on the market for 10 years.
What can I use Opening Master for?
OTB players most often use the Opening Master database when preparing for an opponent. They look up games played by their future opponent in the database and prepare themselves for the opening. The database is also very well suited for preparing the rest of your repertoire – one can easily find out what variations are being played at what rate of success. There is an important difference between OTB and correspondence games however: correspondence games usually feature openings that are completely different from practical chess. With Opening Master, you don’t have to rely on your memory and can freely enjoy all kinds of complicated moves – all of them are easily accessible via the database! The database is frequently used by correspondence players even during the game for looking up whether their position has already occurred in other games, how and by whom it was interpreted and what are the statistics for it.
Who is Opening Master designed for?
Opening Master is designed for all OTB and correspondence players that want to take chess seriously, no matter what their level is. Today, no players, not even the grandmasters, can do without computer assistance.
What environment can I use the Opening Master database in?
The database is published in three versions designed for the most popular chess database software programs – ChessBase (.cbv), ChessAssistant (.cdp) and PGN (.pgn). The PGN format is universal, can be used in all chess environments and comes free of charge.
How is Opening Master different from the databases published by ChessBase and ChessAssistant?
The difference lies within the philosophy of building the database – ChessBase deals with whole tournaments and all the games, even those, which were not played. It builds a database representing the history of the chess game. Opening Master has a more pragmatic approach: it deals with all games that fulfill the following criteria:
- The game is newer than 1.1.1990
- The game has at least 8 played moves
- The players have a rating of at least 1300
- The game was played by people, not by programs
Last but not least, an important difference is the significantly lower price: you can get a year-long access to monthly updates from 59.90 EUR.
How is Opening Master different from free databases?
Despite getting our games from different sources, we dedicate a lot of time to eliminate duplicates. We also normalize the names of the players, which amounts to dozens or even hundreds of corrections a month. The free databases are often very low-quality and cluttered with lots of duplicates.
Where can I find more information and order the Opening Master database?
You can find the newest information about Opening Master at our website www.openingmaster.com. You are welcome to become a member of the ever growing community of our product’s users.