Caissabase - 3.9 Million Games

Someone tipped me off to a fairly new game database - Caissabase (or Caïssabase for all you pedants.) Well, even the author alternates between the two spellings.

http://caissabase.co.uk

It's 3.9 million games in Scid format, last updated in March 2019.

I haven't tried it yet...I just thought I'd throw it out here and see what people's reactions are.

shovelware?

Well, his web site sort of outlines what he did. He merged two decent databases, deleted dupes, added the recent TWIC games, then cleaned it up some. Doesn't exactly seem like shovelware to me.

Dude, he merged two free databases, pruned some games and added recent ones. For free. How can it be "shovelware"?

awesome! thank you. I was looking for a database.

Hi, I'm the creator of Caïssabase, it's not shovelware, it's just a free resource based on previous free resources that went defunct plus any other games I can get my hands on to put into.

It's just a scid database of games.

Ah, thanks for reminding me of this one

. It got updated today btw

I exported to pgn and imported it in TarraschDB, which I like better. It reports 4,199,292 games. Pretty cool.

I like that you can go through opening moves one by one, like an Opening Explorer. Can't see how to do that in ScidvsPC.

Caissabase seems to be missing some really major events, for example, in comparing the scoring for the position:

r1bqkbnr/pp2pppp/2n5/3p4/3P1B2/5N2/PPP2PPP/RN1QKB1R b KQkq - 3 5

Lichess.org master DB says 5...Bg4 scores 50% with 53% draws, while Caissabase shows it scoring 36.2% with 17% draws, a massive difference. A very large number of the games in Caissabase are things like chess.com titled tuesday blitz, and the major GM games visible in the lichess master DB are just not present in caissabase, for example, the event Aeroflot Open 2017 featuring only 2550+ GMs. I love caissabase and appreciate it being available, but it seems that it has some pretty large holes in terms of coverage of top games.

Hey, thank you for your work creating it. It was one of the auto downloadable database options in En Croissant. That's how I discovered it. I don't know much about Chess databases but now I am curious and went searching about it and ended up here.