The chess tournament Hastings 1895 is one of the strongest tournaments of the 19th century, but here we pick it for another reason. Two tournament books were published soon after the tournament. The first one by Cheshire in English, and the second one by Schallopp in German. The books are not independent, because Schallopp knew Cheshire's book and took about two thirds of all games out of it. Nevertheless 36 of the 231 games have different game-scores in both books. That is a remarkable number, I would say, and it shows that many differences we find in today's databases were introduced soon after the tournament. And it gives an idea of how reliable historic game-scores are.

Is there a simple explanation for all these differences? If Schallopp had done a bad job then that would be an easy explanation. In fact, remarks by Schallopp show that he deliberately presented some games differently from Cheshire,

and so it comes as no surprise that chess historian Tim Harding remarked on Schallopp's book that it is often the more reliable one.

It is possible that the process of annotation of the games led to errors in Cheshire's book: The games were annotated by the players themselves, but no player did it for his own games.

If you want to see the differences in detail, here are two images with data from an Excel file I completed on November 1st, 2016 (and if you would like a copy of the file or a more readable PDF version, please use my contact details).