Game Explorer - Go to novelty

The "Moves" tab of a game has an "Explore" link which searches for the current position in the Game Explorer and displays the opening tree.

Now, if you do this after the game deviated from the games in the DB (or at the end of the game, when analyzing), you simply get a message that the position is not found. At this point one would normally want to find out where the game deviated from the master games and try to asses whether the novelty made sense or was more of a mistake.

With the current UI functionality, you have to manually go backwards and click on every move to see whether it's in the DB. This process could be greatly improved if the system would automatically take you to the last position (from the game) which is present in the DB. In other words, "Game Explorer" should open at the novelty rather than saying that the current position is not found.

Does this sound useful?

Yes, but ... the existing behaviour is useful too in providing a shortlink to the current position that you can paste into a forum post. 

Yes, that might be a nice secondary use case.

I don't feel like this important to me anymore. The game database is pretty limited and can't really be considered a representative source of opening statistics. So it doesn't really matter that you can't find the novelty.

Yeah, it only has 1.1 million games.

1 Million might look like a lot, but let me give you an example. Here is an opening line from one of my games:

http://www.chess.com/explorer/index.html?id=8050222&ply=10&black=0

The database here contains 7 games while another online database contains 304.

Quality is much more important than quantity in opening explorer stats. There is no way there are 304 quality games that reached that position. Stats from games played in the under 9 junior champsionship at backwatersville are meaningless in what they say about an opening line. Are you able to list the 304 games that reached that position?

This is the chessbase online DB. No under 9s there. Yes, I can also access the games. I find it useful to review the ideas that were played. I don't really care whether the winning percenage is 35% or 45%. As you go a few moves deeper you can already kind of figure out whether the position improves or not.

You are wrong about the under 9 games, in fact there are even several under 8 games included on those extra games chessbase has over chess.com.   Perform your search again on chessbase online db.  Look at the event name for the games that reached the position from your opening.  A few of the events I'm seeing on there when I look at your opening:

- Croation under 9 girls championship

- World Championship under 8 girls

- World Championship under 8

- A number of other under 12 and under 16 events.

Also have a look at the Elo column on the game list, many of them don't have ratings (i.e. not enough games to have a rating), and some of those that do have ratings are below 1000, and very few are above 2200. Many of these are rubbish games, and I don't think looking through these games, or relying on stats derived from them is  useful. 

Chess.com attempts to include only games where at least one of the players was 2200. Doing this reduces the volume of games, but it avoids the type of rubbish you see on the chessbase online db.

Sorry, I'm not as good as you. Rubbish games from players under 2200 are quite instructive for me.

Also, you could very well have a filter for "high ELO games" or present the as two separate databases.

But this already is a deviation from the original topic. In case the database is deemed as good, then "Go to novelty" is a useful feature, won't you agree?

My point was not that all games under 2200 are rubbish, but it seemed that the majority of those 304 games you referred to were either from players without ratings, or with very low ratings, and yes, in terms of opening study I do think most of those are rubbish, if I wanted to see rubbish games at that level, I'd just study my own :-) In a perfect world, you'd have an ELO filter on the opening explorer on both here and chessbase's online database, but unless I missed it , I think both sites are missing this , and without this feature, I'd prefer a 2200+ database over a "anything goes" database.

But to get back to your original topic, yes I agree "Go to novelty" would be a great feature.

Edit:  To tie the two threads together, I also think 'go to novelty' is much more useful with a high quality database, I'm not very interested in the position in my game where the girl who came last in the under 9 croation girls chamspionship hung her queen in the same foolish way I did, so the interesting novelties may appear earlier in the game when 'rubbish' games are discarded.