There's a lot of pgn tools out there I see. I want to learn to manage databases of games at a high level- including filtering, searching, importing batches of files, and even, if possible, to merge multiple games into one game with variations. I'm willing to take the time to learn the software, but I don't want to start going down the wrong path.

What's the best pgn tools available today? I use Deep Shredder as an engine/interface on a mac. I'm researching my options, but if anyone has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

What are pgn's?

portable game notation files. They're the records of your games.

They list the moves, plus other info like players names, date, etc.  With this pgn, you can inport that game into your chess engine/interface without having to enter all the moves manually again.

I'd say Scid is your best bet for a free tool.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/scid/files/
http://scid.sourceforge.net/tutorial/index.html

Scid is also a decent, though not great, chess program.

Thanks ipcress12,

I downloaded it earlier today, and then read somewhere online that I should get scid vs mac (because it's still maintained with updates/patches), but the link to that download didn't work. 

But I'll check it out some more now. Thanks for the recomendation and links!

Where can I learn to manage pgn's

I have a slightly different question.

The question I am wondering is. Is it possible to records ones own PGN's into a Game Explorer type of database and have it filter which positions you do better in vs which ones you do worse in.

I know currently chess.com has a very similar function on there Game Explorer for Online chess games. However, I have noticed they do not have one for live chess games.

X_Player: Only if someone writes an application like that and makes it available. Or you have the progamming chops yourself.

The tricky bit is deciding what a class of positions is. Pawn chains? An isolated QP? A set of openings? Kingside attacks? Open, semi-open or closed positions? Queenless middlegames?

Computers don't know that stuff without programmers telling them how. And it's a murky problem for programmers to decide.

Corfitz: That's the easy part.

I am unhappy with all of the PGN stuff out there.  Scid (linux only I suspect) is the best I've used.  I actually paid for my membership here for the sake of keeping up with the PGN mess here and not in Scid.    I'd love to have the time to improve Scid to do what I want. 8( 

What I mean is.

When you go to a opening database like for example.

http://www.chess.com/explorer/

^^ It shows Master Games with different first moves like:

1.e4

with 698,468 games played etc.

If you click on the drop box (Master Games) you can see it say different options like the words "My Games"

I have noticed chess.com shows examples of games I played online/correspondence chess on that topic.

However, It does not show my live games.

I bascially want a way of looking at my live games in a similar process.

I was just wondering if it is possible to do that some way.

Ah. That's more straightforward. However, I don't know of anything you can download that will do that.

As I recall, chess.com has had troubles making that feature really work.

Possibly the full version of Chessbase would do that, but I don't know for sure.

Well I didn't understand your post. I had no idea they called it an opening tree and I don't know what SCID is.

I have the impression that X is looking for more than a PGN reader/PGN merger.

I thought he wanted a program which will display a tree and the statistics associated with each branch, preferably with a decent graphics interface.

I want something like the below:

Chess.com has it on there Game Explorer

http://www.chess.com/explorer

If you notice the tab has "My Games"  It shows you my online chess games. So far I have only played 7 games online chess in total 3 from white and like 4 from black I believe.

However, It shows the percentages I win/draw/lose after my opponents make there moves.

My goal is to try and get it so I can have all my chess games on there. For exampe I have over 600 live chess games. I was wondering if there was a way/program which allows a person to mash all there games in a similar format.

The idea would be to see were I do worse in and try to improve that spot.

Obvious only 3 online chess games is not a huge sample size. However, just to give you example. What if I thought I did bad against 1...e5 than when I look at the results I would see that in fact I been doing good against it and seem to might be doing worse against 1...e6 for example.

Also it would be nice to have a filter on it. So I could filter the low level players from higher level ones.

I think it could be a useful improvement tool of sorts.

Thank you everybody for all your posts. Thank you ipcress12 for the links to the source files or whatever, but I didn't really know how to compile them or make them work. I like the downloads where when you double click the installer file, you are then asked to drag the app to your applications folder - nice and simple. Then there's usually a user-guide or readme file included. So I went back to the version of Scid I had previously downloaded - v4.4 (I think the newest/most recent is 4.9) and fooled around with it a bit and I like it. I just have to learn how to use it a bit more. I'll probably have to check youTube videos for some good guidance. Hopefully some day I'll figure out how to aquire the latest version of Scid. Thank you very much CorfitzUlfeldt for your advice (especially cnt-t to open the tree window).

Jon: That link also included an installer file:

Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/scid/files/
Click on "Download Scid-4.6.1.exe (127.4 MB)" text

I'm just recently started using scid, and I'm liking it a lot. I've found several youTube video tutorials. Just search on youTube for "using scid".

Thank you CorfitzUlfeldt for the ^t tip.

Thanks! I'll check it out.

http://www.playwitharena.com