Scid vs. PC - Preparing for an opponent
Updated: Jan 23
It is 1980. You have just found out that in the next game of a chess tournament your opponent will be a strong player who occupies the first place in the table. The stakes of this game are very high for you. If you win, you'll gain a higher chess category and a lot of ELO rating points. If you lose... you'd rather not think about it further. You only have one day, and the game is tomorrow. In that one day you want to get the records of all the games played by your tomorrow's opponent in the last 2 years. You don't know if you will have enough time to analyze the debuts and continuations and the plans your opponent uses in the middle game. Ufff. Big of it and only one day... Maybe your colleagues can help you? .... And if not ? ;-)
In the days when no one believed that a computer could win against a human in a game of chess, preparation for a game of chess with a future opponent was... "analog" and took a lot of time and often involved many chess players to work together. Unfortunately, not everyone had a friend who played and understood chess at the level of a master or grandmaster.
Today, when chess players have access to databases of chess games and specialized software to work with such databases, preparation for a game against another chess player takes a maximum of a few tens of minutes instead of one or up to several days as it did in the past.
This part of the course is prepared in Scid vs. PC version 4.22 in such a way that the vast majority of this program's capabilities can be used in previous versions 4.x.
(Scid vs PC 4.0 was released in 2010).
In this part of the course I will show you how to use the Scid v. PC program to effectively prepare for a game against another chess player.
Let's start with...
Prepare Against...
Select the function Player Finder in the Windows toolbar.
Click to enlarge (works with any image)
Note!
Instead of the Player Finder, you can use the Player Report function from the Tools toolbar.
The difference is that by using the Player Finder function you will avoid a possible mistake while typing the name of the chess player you want to prepare against.
Let's enter the chess player's name - Spanton - in the Player field.
Press Enter or click the Update button.
In this example, we are interested in a chess player named Spanton, Tim R.
Let's click on the row with that name.
A Player Information window will open containing basic information about the Spanton, Tim R chess player.
At the very beginning of preparation, let's assume that we will be playing in the same tournament as our opponent ;-)
First, let's look for information on how our opponent fared in chess tournaments with a larger number of players (Open) in which he achieved a result of 2000 Elo or more.
Tournaments.
Let's click on the Tournaments button.
Look for a tournament with the following criteria:
Played since 2015
With number of players minimum 40 and maximum 60
With number of chess games minimum 150 in the whole tournament
With average Elo rating at least 1800
Enter our criteria in the fields of the newly opened window.
