Caissabase

2024-04-27

Download Caissabase (630MB)
white pawn on a faded board

What is Caissabase?

When I got back into Chess a few years back I couldn’t find a decent regularly updated database of master strength games.

There were some good ones but they were years out of date or unsupported (like Millionbase) but without regular updates their utility is somewhat limited.

I resolved to collect all the master strength games I could find into a single database for myself - I then realised this would be useful other people!

Caissa is the goddess of chess and it’s a database hence Caissbase was born.

What is in Caïssabase?

Currently ~5.5 million games

I started from the following databases/sources.

  • Millionbase
  • Kingbase

I then merge in all of the TWIC back issues up to the date of the current version of caissabase - periodically I update pgnmentor etc as well.

If you haven't seen The Week in Chess and www.pgnmentor.com/ - check both out they are brilliant.

Caissabase would be a lot less current without the work they do!.

If you have anything I'm missing or interesting links, tweet me @caissabase

What about curation?

Roughly I followed these rules.

  • Remove all duplicates (as much as possible, with 5M games some slip through)
  • Remove all games with less than 5 moves
  • Aimed for all games to have one (or both) players at least master strength (2000+ ELO)
  • Fixed names and event spellings where possible
  • Inserted ELO's where known
  • Inserted extended ECO opening codes

Release Schedule

On average I'll be aiming for once a quarter which will always include the previous months TWIC etc.

I'll announce each new release on twitter @caissabase (if I remember)

What software do I need?

Scid vs PC

It's available for Linux, Windows and MacOSX so you should be covered unless you are on BeOS ;).

Scid may also work but I build the database on ScidVsPc.

How to use ScidVsPc is beyond the scope of this project but YouTube has some good tutorials.

If you use something other than Scid (e.g. Chessbase) you can export the Scid files back out as PGN and reimport into whatever you do use.

The option is under :- 

Tools - Export all filter games - Export filter to PGN

If you have applied a filter make sure you reset the filter before exporting.

It'll be a big PGN file (about 3GB) but once imported to chessbase or whatever you want to use you can delete it.

Privacy/Cookie Policy

I don't set a cookie, I don't use any kind of tracking beacon.

I don't fingerprint your browser or any of that junk.

The only log I have of your visit is what Apache stores and that log is deleted every 24 hrs.

Can I give you money?

Nope - kind of you to offer though, The only cost to me of this project was registering a domain name as I already have servers

If I take money I'll feel obligated and this is just a task I do for myself anyway.

Legal/Copyright

Where I live facts are not copyrightable, Chess moves played in a game are facts.

You'll notice there are no comments on any of the games as comments are copyrightable.