English Chess Forum

ChessBase 10 sports a new feature allowing live updates from a ChessBase server.

Has anyone compared the games available via this service with the ones available from the excellent TWIC service for a similar period?

Is one a sub-set of the other or is the Venn relationship more of an intersection?

This is "Geeky Question of the Day" for Monday August 10th, 2009.

The long-ish silence since the original post was made perhaps indicates that forum users don't use the latest CB facilities. Personally I still use ChessBase 7 for the great majority of my database work because I learnt to use it many years ago, know it well and find it does 95% of the things which I need a database for. I found CB 8 very disappointing when it came out - various little tweaks which had been added to CB 7 at the behest of knowledgeable people had seemingly disappeared overnight in a misguided quest for 'Windows compatibility'. It felt like using a typewriter on which someone had rearranged the keys. Though things improved markedly with CB 9 (which I sometimes use for connection to playchess.com to watch live games or to create diagrams for webpages), the additional fancy features in 9 and 10 have never managed to lure me away from my beloved CB 7. I believe that quite a number of other chess writers, publishers and editors still use CB 7. That said, I can understand why people who need a database as active players (rather than writers/publishers) probably prefer the latest version.

As regards downloading from TWIC/ChessBase: I have stuck to the old method of downloading a zip file from TWIC and manually adding games to my database. I think it is akin to the way it works with cameras - those who learnt to handle a camera when everything had to be set manually prefer the extra control they get from doing it this way, whereas those who are used to modern automation tend to set a camera to 'auto' for everything.

To be honest, the Chessbase 10 updates from .de thingy and is no where near as extensive as TWIC and takes ages for them to get games up from.

Ben