Best of Chess

Best of Chess extracts the most spectacular games from a PGN database. Each game is evaluated on 3 features.

. King Attack bonus.

. Material Sacrifice bonus.

. Length of the game, the less number of moves a game is won the higher the bonus.

If a game exceeds the total bonus of 20.000 points the game is stored in a new PGN file called Best-of-Chess.pgn.

Consider this game taken from ChessBase MegaBase-2025, played in 1855. The game is output with the following extra PGN tags:

[Event "Best of Chess"]
[Site "King-Attacks, Sacrifices, Short Games"]
[King "7440"] * King Attack evaluation
[Short "7400"] * Short Game bonus
[Sac "18000"] * Pawn units sacrificed - 18 in this game
[Total "32840"] * Total evaluation

What's in the Download ?

. Best-of-Chess.exe, just double click to run and select a PGN database.

. MillionBase, the Rebel PGN database of 3.45 million human games.

. How-Rebel-Extreme-plays-chess, a PGN collection of 88.800 games it played.

. Several PGN output files : Alekhine.pgn, Morphy.pgn, Best-of-Rebel-Extreme.pgn, their best games.

Parameters in Best-of-Chess.ini

PGN Output Margin = 200
King Attack Factor = 100
Short Games Factor = 100
Sacrifice Factor = 100
Player =

PGN Output Margin : defines the minimum total evaluation score needed to output a game, 200 means 20.000 points, 100 means 10.000 points, 0 means every game is evaluated and stored in the output PGN.

Player = Morphy, P : will output the games of the famous Paul Morphy, consider the PGN Output Margin = 0 using this option in case you want all his games.

King Attack Factor , Short Games Factor and Sacrifice Factor are tuning percentages. In case you feel the King Attack scores are too high lower the percentage, if you think the Short Games score are too low increase the percentage, and so on.

REMARK - We use PGN-EXTRACT by David J. Barnes to formalize the input PGN and prepare for fast evaluation. However PGN-EXTRACT is pretty strict and may output many comments on your screen. It does no harm, but if it annoys you use Best-of-Chess-Silent.exe, but then you will miss the Game count display progression.