what percentage of top players here at chess.com use the game explorer?

What percentage of top players here at chess.com use the game explorer?

Just a thought.

38%

Depends on your definition of "top players".  I get 39%.

I reckon by to players you mean over the 2200+/2300+, then I think that 99% consult DB's, yo!

not even sure what that is i'm so new ,...

  i'm still trying to find how i managed to gain four profile points?

lol , because all the "REGS" must grow tiresome of the questions.

1 point per forum post

Yeah Im guessing most all the 2200+ consult it.

You are a messenger tonydal you deliver it.

I use it more to see what openings my opponents do poorly against and then I play that opening against them. I use chess assistant much more than the game explorer here and in some games I use nothing.... I just play.

What is the game "Explorer" Popeye?

Game explorer is a feature here at chess.com.

You can refer to it when you are in the opening of a game it will list moves with the number of masters who have played them and give a percentage of win loss draw.

That is the way I see it maybe some one can give a better answer. 

Thanks to all who have responded to my question it is interesting to me.

I think the top players have already invested in databases of recent master games, combined with strong engines for analysis. The opening explorer is a good tool, but can't be compared with the libraries those players have.

I use it in two ways - first to check my previous games to see what decisions I've reached before, an' see where I went right or wrong an' second to see what is 'book' to see how I can get out of that asap

an' Puchiko, people usin' engines AREN'T players at all !!!!!!!

 I use it for the opening

I use Chess Assistant and Chess Base

ChessBase, however, I don't really play on the site.

Do you prefer one over the other?

I think it's pretty useful, but I believe it deserves much constructive criticism to improve--it's sad that it never has never been improved upon over many months.

1) Each move-link on the right side, should say the actual opening. If I find this new opening variation on "Related openings" links at the bottom, I would like to see it on the right so I know quickly which move goes into it. Instead, game explorer, makes me click it and open a new tab, then see the move, then go back and continue the exploration.

2) Why not make it more like chessGames website, where you can look at a certain master and see all their games? Or their most common openings.

Here's my question to those using ChessBase or ChessAssistant. Are there more games there than game explorer? Is that why you pay for that instead?

There is no comparison.

In ChessBase and ChessAssistant, the user can add or remove games from a database, and can create new databases. Advantages are not simply larger or smaller and selective databases. Both programs have many capacities that do not exist in an online game explorer.

In ChessBase, which I use daily, I created a database consisting of games played between masters since 2000. I identified and culled from the base all draws less than twenty moves. Then I created an "opening book." This "book" looks and functions much like the game explorer on this site, but is far superior when my intent is to play within current theory. If I prefer to play in the manner of nineteenth century players, I could create a database and book consisting only of those games. If I want to follow only Kramnik's games, that too, is a snap.

I also have a database consisting of all games that I've played online, excluding bullet games. I've played on half a dozen "live sites" and more than a dozen turn-based or correspondence sites. This one base has over 45,000 games. I can search it for endgame, middlegame, or opening positions. I can search by year, material, event/site, opponent, annotator, and more. I can quickly locate the game in which I was checkmated by two pawns. I can find all fifteen instances of games coming down to one player trying to checkmate with bishop and knight against a lone king.

For my teaching of youth, I have created a number of tactical problem sets, including a homemade publication called "A Checklist of Checkmates." My "Checklist" explains the basic checkmate patterns, organizes them in a manner superior to existing publications, such as How to Beat Your Dad at Chess, and presents seven problem sets. ChessBase made it possible for me to locate easily games with each of these checkmate patterns.

When I wanted to study queen versus two rooks, I was able to locate all the games in any of my databases in which this imbalance occurred. I can serch my own games, master games, or all games across multiple databases.

I have databases downloaded from websites and have created others from my own games that I use for training much like one finds in the tactics trainer here.

A webpage with replayable games and a downloadable pgn file of featured games can be created with the ChessBase program. The company uses their own software to do this on the ChessBase News site, and you can use their program to do it on yours if you wish.

After posting the above, I checked my database for smother mates with a rook blocking in the dead king. There are twenty-seven instances in my online database. I lost seven and won twenty. Two were training exercises from an online playing site, and one was not an online game, but played against Chessmaster's "Vlad".

In an additional four instances--three wins for me--a knight blocks its own monarch's escape.

This data required a few seconds to locate in ChessBase.

A few seconds more turned up twenty-seven instances of the knight (and 115 of the rook) blocking its king dating from one of Greco's games to recent tournament practice, including this gem: