01 August 2016

Korchnoi's Events 1977-1996

Continuing with Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (1946-1977), aka 'Korchnoi's TMER', after Korchnoi's Matches 1946-1977 I had to tackle the post-1977 period. How to start?

In my archive a found a few PGN collections of Korchnoi's games that I had saved in the 2001-2002 time frame. Unfortunately, I didn't document the origin of these files, but I should be able to work that out as I delve into their contents.

I chose one of the files, extracted all games from 1977 and afterwards (2130 games, including many duplicates), and loaded the PGN headers into a database. The file I chose had no information in the PGN '[Event]' tag, so I was forced to work with the '[Site]' tag. This tag had never been standardized and I found over 730 different combinations of year/site, covering the period 1977-1996.

I decided to continue with all games where the same year/site combination occurred at least four times. I found 160 such occurrences and added the results to my page on Korchnoi's TMER. The result is less clean than I hoped to have at this point, but it gives me an overview of Korchnoi's events in the 20 year period starting with the 1977-1978 World Championship cycle.

No comments: