- Admin wrote:
- And what's the purpose of Beauty analysis?
1. Determining the beauty of games
You now have a database of ten million games, but how do you find the really exciting hidden treasures in it? In earlier versions of ChessBase there were some approaches to this: The search for combinations. But it was not always possible to find the most beautiful games.
ChessBase 17 attributes "beauty" to each game, in four stages. Beauty is awarded between zero and three medals in a new column of the game list. This makes each database sortable by beauty, i.e. the spectacular games are at the top. This is only possible in the new data format (2CBH). We will talk about this format later in this article.
I decided to try this function on the games between Arjun Erigaisi vs Gukesh in ChessBase India's recent Originals Death Match 2.0. I clicked on the "Set Beauty"...
and ChessBase 17 immediately tells me which games I should look at first
You can set the beauty values once for your large databases. This takes a few hours, because every game has to be replayed, and every position has to be examined. A fast computer can handle about 600 games per second.
I found a very interesting use of this feature. Let's say I have been very keen to study the games of Alexander Alekhine. So I open my Mega Database and search for the games of Alekhine. Then I select all the games of Alekhine and paste them in a new 2CBH format database. The Mega Database 2023 comes in 2CBH format, so you would not even need to create a new database for using the set beauty button on the games of Alekhine. I have 2328 games of Alekhine in a new database now. I go to the games tab and click on Set Beauty button as shown above. It takes roughly two seconds for the entire process to be done.
The great Alekhine was an amazingly aggressive player, and he has so many beautiful attacking games to his credit. The most attractive ones get three medals.
Trusting the Beauty ranking I selected the game Duras vs Alekhine. Now I can click on the Replay Training button, take the black pieces and guess the moves played by Alekhine. In this way, I am guaranteed that I will enjoy the game and understand all its subtleties.
But there is another thing that can be done in ChessBase 17, which is Detect Sacrifices! There is a red button to the bottom of your screen.
Once I click on the "detect sacrifices" button, all the positions that have a sacrifice are automatically marked, and I can use this as training material.
The white bishop has moved to b7. The training function wants to know: how did Alekhine as Black finish the game?
Answer: Black pushed his pawn down the board to f3, and after Bxd5 f2 is just game over!
You can see how just two clicks – Set Beauty in the Database and then Detect Sacrifices when you open the game – can give you the key moments in the games of any database.
This is great for training material, and it can help you to better understand the games of many world class players.
The full functionality of this new feature is only available in the new 2CBH data format. But in all other database types (including PGN) you can search for beautiful games: to do this, click on "Beautiful games" in the advanced search mask. This will find all games with at least one beauty medal.
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