As it stands right now, if I want a student of mine to play through a bunch of games by a specific player, I must sent them to chessgames.com, 365chess, or some other site.
I would like to be able to send them here.
Downloading PGN's for opening study
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I don't use this feature because I have better resources elsewhere, but I endorse your complaint. Chess.com could do a lot to make its database features more useful.
As it stands right now, if I want a student of mine to play through a bunch of games by a specific player, I must sent them to chessgames.com, 365chess, or some other site.
I would like to be able to send them here.
As it stands right now, if I want a student of mine to play through a bunch of games by a specific player, I must sent them to chessgames.com, 365chess, or some other site.
I would like to be able to send them here.
In the v2 chess.com, I was able to use the opening explorer to reach a certain position and from there, see a list of all the master games in the database via the "View all games from current position" link.
This was particularly useful to study an opening the way IM Silman recommends on this very site: grab a whole bunch of games with that opening and play through them quickly to get a grasp of the general ideas and common plans. I only needed to click the link, order by descending rating of white or black, depending on which side of the opening I wanted to learn, and download a PGN. Granted, this was only possible page per page (30 games or so?), but it was possible.
However, in v3, I no longer seem to be able to achieve this: there is no link. I can still click the name of the opening (but that's not the same as being able to get all the games from an exact position!) and from there click on the "X games" link, but instead of getting a list of the games in the database with that opening, it just gives me... well, I don't really know what it is, but it looks like just random master games from any opening. I can search again on that screen (chess.com/games), but again, with very limited search options on the starting position (and no order by rating). At least I can still download a pgn here, but to get an interesting sample from the total number of available games seems impossible.
Was this a deliberate choice in designing the opening explorer for v3? Full access to the master games is one of the perks of having a paying membership, yet this just feels very limited and not user friendly. I guess it won't be permanently possible to switch back to v2, so I sure hope this changes in the near future.