The PGN comparer

This is the PGN file comparer. It shows a comparison of Alekhine's games at Chessbase and Chessgames. Have a look at the statistical data.

The next picture shows the comparison of Alekhine's games from four sources: Chessbase, Chessgames, a high quality collector's database and a Russian database.

More than 24 % of the games have different moves or results! 413 games have a differing moves: these are the hard to find differences (compared to only 217 games having different number of moves).

This is a comparison of the tournament Hastings 1895 with data from six sources. 53 games have move differences and I have checked the two tournament books by Cheshire and Schallopp, resp.: for 36 cases the difference appears already there! In other words: the two tournament books differ in a seventh of all games. And this surprises even more, if you know that Schallopp's book heavily depends on Cheshire's. Please draw your first conclusion on the reliabilty of historical game-scores.

Newly added: The details on Hastings 1895.

Newly added: Details on the Asymmetric Comparison.

The Viewer

This is the viewer showing the comparison result of Alekhine's games from Chessbase and Chessgames. It always opens with showing the games with move or result differences. Note the Game List on the right at the bottom. There you select the next pair of differing games.

Once a pair of games is selected, a text describing the differences appears on the left, while the two boards show the first difference of the game.

A more complicated example is shown here.

If you click on the differences on the left, the boards will show the corresponding position.

If there are so many differences as in the last example, you can press the button 'Visualize differences' and you will get:

The colors are explained in the menu where also some additional examples can be found.

The button 'Blunder check' opens the following dialog. Here you get information on blunders, but only those positions are analysed, which do not appear in the other game.

This blunder check result belongs to another game played by Alekhine. Sometimes blunders are so heavy that you will identify immediately that the corresponding game-score is faulty.

If you switch from the games with differing results and moves (tab 'Differing games') to those without such differences (tab 'Identical games'), you will get information on other kind of differences.

If more than two files are compared, a game may have three or more different versions. That's why the presentation of the Game List is a bit different then.

The selected game has three different versions and you can select the pairwise comparisons within the Game List. On the left you see a description of the different versions with their sets of equal versions.

Comparison results are only slightly alterable: you may add information to the objects in the Game List (via the context menu). Compilations are similar to results, because the can be shown with the viewer, but you can add games from different results via Drag&Drop. Compilations are managed by the context menu shown here.

The menus of the Result viewer offer rich content. Please try everything (I hope all options are self-explaining).


Note: In a PGN comparison, the size of each individual file is limited to 8.0 MB. This conservative and strict limit prevents silent crashes due to insufficient memory. However, the size is sufficient for large tournaments and players with many games, and for the most issues of The Week in Chess as well.