I'm looking for a link to download a free database PGN.  Not the PGN utility but the PGN itself. Something like millions of games from pre historic to date? any one knows this ? or at least like in Chessbase Light one?

thanks.

http://www.pgnmentor.com/files.html#players

Lots of games here, but you have to download groups of smaller files

thanks, yeah I browse that one. but I still need to copy paste all the pgn into one file, so that's not what in my mind now.

http://www.top-5000.nl/pgn.htm

Check the *Million Base 1.74* link (the other links are computer vs computer and computer vs machine games)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/icofybase/

Selamat Hari Natal 2009 dan Tahun Baru 2010,

Semoga Tuhan Selalu Memberkati Kita Semua.

before I download the Million base 1.74 , anyone know up to what year the database is ? is it more than 100Mb so I like to know for sure. the website say update to TWIC but up to when?

thanks.

I had downloaded the million database like half a year before, and it had games from the last quarter of 2008.

I had failed to find anything newer and larger than those icofybase and million databases. You'll perhaps need to feed them frequently by the TWIC databases manually if you want to be up to date.

Most recent games in the database are the Tromso Arctic Chess Challenge in Aug 2008

well, that's quite ok for freebies. i will just manually update it with TWIC then. thanks a lot.

Thanks for this post I'll can use the info

Hi, I would like to get games with comments and variants, anybody knows if this exist as a pgn file???

pre-historic?   like the Jurrasic Defense?

Even if you were able to find a database of all known games since there was a record of a complete chess game that is above 5 million games as of today, you would need a program to manage, search and sort through the game. The free PGN reader and Windows will be inadequate and will probably be more frustarting than useful.

Just buy an old version of Chessbase or Chess Assitant and download all the other games from TWIC to update your database from the time that the games were last updated.

batgirl, do you have some games from before the dawn of chess's written history?  That would make a great blog entry I think.

Why buy anything? Use ChessDB or SCID to manage large databases. They aren't always the easiest programs to use, but they are really powerful, and free. I dont have link available, but a simple google search can help you find them.

You'll find scid at http://scid.sourceforge.net. There are a couple of good videos showing how to use scid here

http://www.chessvideos.tv/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6461 and

http://www.chessvideos.tv/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6635

With being new to using chess databases I found them invaluable.

The next computer skill needed to mine all that chess data: CQL (Chess Query Language)

http://rbnn.com/cql/

If you use SCID and PGN, then you'll need CQL.

I don't know if you count 1834 as prehistoric. If so, http://www.chessopolis.com/chessfiles/pgn_events_pre-1992.htm will give you 50 games played in 1834 and a few* more recent ones if you look around the site. Best to use their ftp server if you're feeling hungry

* a bit of an understatement

It's exacly what I did. After trying to activate chessbase10 and founding a Trojan in the crack, I decided to try SCID and you know what? I am pretty satisfied. It does a lot for a freeware and for my current chess level.

 I downloaded the 1.74M database and had to update it with TWIC manually. Now it has almost 2M games and I keep updating it every tuesday, come rain or come shine :-)