25 November 2010

'Modern Chess Brilliancies' in PGN

In my most recent post, Two Items on GM Larry Evans, I wasn't happy about having two games without any PGN, so I set off looking for a digital copy of the game scores from 'Modern Chess Brilliancies', first published by Evans in 1970. I found one on Ossimitz: chess-collections from books. For many reasons, this site is not one of my favorites for digital game collections, but there appeared to be nothing else.

I downloaded the ZIP, discovered that it contained a single file from 2001 in Chessbase CBV format, and converted the CBV to PGN. The PGN turned out to be full of annofritz comments, which are worse than useless, so I stripped those out, leaving just the moves of the games. I noticed that the first game in the book was out of sequence in the file, so I moved it to its logical place. Then I noticed that many of the games had been continued beyond the point where the players resigned. Someone had added Evans' comments showing how mate was inevitable by including the mating sequence as part of the game. I stripped those out too.

The converted file is available at mark-weeks.com/cfaa/eva-mcbr.zip. I've always wanted to be able to analyze the games with the help of an engine and now I can.

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