Greco's Database

For many years I have found the games credited to Gioachino Greco useful in both study and teaching. His games have been praised by strong players throughout history, most notably by Domenico Lorenzo Ponziani, Mikhail Botvinnik, and Max Euwe. Botvinnik is often quoted as saying the Greco was the first chess master. A selection of his games, almost certainly composed, are available in ChessBase Mega 2020 (82 games), as well as online collections that are mostly derived from earlier versions of the ChessBase database. Chessgames.com has 79 games; 365Chess.com has 75--that one game lists "Analysis Analyze" as the Black player is a dead giveaway that ChessBase is their source.

However, there are more games, or variations of these games that can be credited to Greco. I started looking outside the databases eight years ago when I encountered a line credited by Garry Kasparov (or his ghostwriter) to Greco, but failed to find it in ChessBase (see "Tracking Down Greco's Games"). A few months later, I began the slow process of entering into a database the games and variations in William Lewis, Gioachino Greco on the Game of Chess (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819). Lewis has 168 variations arranged into 47 games. His source was a French edition of Greco's games, which was probably based on the last manuscripts Greco created (1625 in Paris). The games presented by Lewis were rearranged by another Lewis--Angelo Lewis, writing under the pseudonym Louis Hoffmann (1900). Hoffmann's collection increased the number of games to 77, reducing the number of variations on each game (see "Gioachino Greco on the Game of Chess"). My chess camp workbook that summer was derived almost entirely from games in Lewis 1819. Unfortunately, my hard drive crashed later that summer, and the last backup had been in February. 

When I started using the ChessBase database (2004), it had been in the works for more than two decades. According to the article "ChessBase is 25" (19 May 2011), Matthias Wüllenweber created the first database on an Atari ST and sent a disk to Kasparov in 1984. ChessBase came out with their first commercial version of the database in January 1987. The article does not identify Wüllenweber's sources for games, which must have been many. However, one print book that would have been an exceptional beginning sits on my shelves.

David Levy, and Kevin O’Connell, eds. Oxford Encyclopedia of Chess Games, vol. 1 1485-1866 (1981) lists sources for every game included, a practice that should be more common among publishers of chess books (and software). In the past week, I have created a spreadsheet that lists the 77 Greco games in Levy and O'Connell (Hoffmann is their sole source) and whether each one is in Mega 2020, chessgames.com, and 365chess.com. Levy and O'Connell annotate 34 of the games, crediting Greco with the annotations. Presumably these annotations correspond to Hoffmann's variations (confirming this hunch may be the next step in my research work).

Two weeks ago I finished a project that had taken a couple of years because I would work on it for an hour once or twice a year. I now have a database with all of the games from Francis Beale, The Royall Art of Chesse-Play (London 1656). Nine of these are in ChessBase Mega 2020. Beale carries three of these beyond the endpoint in the database. I suspect that many or most of them appear as annotations in Levy and O'Connell.