5.5: Opening Report
ChessDB can generate two types of report which are very useful for openings study and tournament preparation. They are the Opening Report and the Player Report. These look similar, but have different uses and options.
Opening Reports
ChessDB can produce an opening report that displays interesting facts about an opening position. To generate an opening report, first make sure the displayed position is the one you want a report for, then select Opening Report from the Tools menu.
The Opening Report window displays the results of the report ChessDB generated. The File menu has commands to save the report to a file in plain text, HTML or LaTeX format.
The first sections of the report present information on the games that reach the report position, and moves played from the position. You can see if the opening is becoming more popular, if it has many short draws, and what move orders (transpositions) are used to reach it.
The Positional Themes section reports the frequency of certain common positional themes in the report games. For this, the first 20 moves of each game (hence the first 40 positions of each game after the starting position) are examined. To be counted as containing a theme, a game must contain that particular theme in at least 4 positions of its first 20 moves. This avoids the brief occurrence of a theme (such as an isolated Queen pawn which is quickly captured) distorting results.
The final and largest part of the report is the theory table. When saving the report to a file, you can choose to save just the theory table, a compact report without the theory table, or the whole report.
Almost all the report sections can be turned on or off or adjusted in the opening report options, so you can customize a report to only show the information that interests you.
Most items of information in the report window that are shown in color, invoke some action when selected with the left mouse button. For example, you can click on a game reference to load that game, or click on a positional theme to set the filter to contain only the report games where that theme occurred.
Favorites
The [Favorites] menu in the report window lets you maintain a collection of favorite opening report positions and generate the opening reports for all those positions easily. Selecting "Add Report..." from the Favorites menu will add the current position as a favorite report position; you will be prompted to enter a name that will be used as the filename when favorite reports are generated.
Select "Generate Reports..." from the Favorites menu to generate a report for each of your favorite reports using the current database. A dialog box will appear allowing you to specify the report type and format, and a directory where report files will be saved. A suitable suffix for the format you selected (e.g. ".html" for HTML format) will be added to each report file name.
Player Reports
A Player Report is very similar to an opening report, but it contains information about the games of a single player with the white or black pieces. You can generate a player report from the Tools menu, or from the Player Information window.
A player report can be generated either for all games by the specified player with the specified pieces, or for only the subset of those games which reach the current position on the main window chessboard.
Limits
There is a limit of 2000 games for most data generated by reports, so if the report position occurs in more than 2000 games, some results may be slightly incorrect.
Also, there is a limit of 500 games for the theory table. If the report position occurs in more than 500 games, only the 500 games with the highest average Elo rating are used to generate the theory table. You can adjust the number of games used to generate the theory table in the Report options.
If you would like to contribute to the tutorial or see anything that should be updated, corrected or improved, please contact David Kirkby. But please note David only speaks English.
Website administered by Dr. David Kirkby
This page was last modified: September 16, 2007. 10:41:41 am GMT