Hello fellow chess players ! If you are enough experimented with the game, you might know about Chessbase. For those who don't know what it is, it is a database with millions and millions of registered chess games. It strongly helps for training, as it can have brillant chess examples for openings, endgames, preparation, ... Therefore, Lichess also has a free datable ! My point is that Lichess could further develop his database. They don't necessarily have to add more games. For example, I was thinking about a research bar for searching games for a certain player. Like that, you type a player that you appreciate, such as "Magnus Carlsen", and you can analyse his fascinating endgames techniques. Other research features can be a good looking idea to me. Thus, improving this feature can make Lichess an amazing tool for serious training. Thank you !
It's wasted potential because nobody has put in the effort to make it user friendly or searchable. New games are added from tournament broadcasts which is not comprehensive while many older games are missing.
I think most competitive chess players prefer the 10+ million databases, like the Mega Database or TWIC for 2 main reasons:
-- As @lizani also said, you can search for and study older games (of past world champions, immortal games of legendary players, games from before engines became a thing etc.). You can basically search among all accessible OTB games ever recorded in some digital form
-- Players who participate regularly in OTB chess tournaments want to find as many relevant games as possible played by their opponents in order to prepare before games, and so extensive databases like Mega Database and TWIC have become the standard go to because they are maintained and regularly updated with recent OTB games.
Now I think @lichess has also done a great job with the Lichess Master's database and Openings explorer, but I feel it serves a slightly different purpose. I would say it is a great tool for quickly analyzing an opening idea or line, looking for trends at the very top level, but I would not count on it for building repertoires, deeper analysis, searching for novelties etc.
Still, I feel like when preparing against an opponent for an OTB tournament, most players are interested mainly in recent games played in the past years, and so the Lichess Broadcasts collection of games is already a great option, containing broadcasted games starting from 2020 [*https://database.lichess.org/#broadcasts*]. You will still not find, however, all the games that you may find in TWIC / Mega Database, and you will not find games for all players, that may not have participated in tournaments with live boards.
But even so, I think that such an integrated database for searching OTB games of opponents is the only thing missing from a platform like @lichess that already has pretty much everything you could think of and hope from a free chess platform.
**P.S.** I have actually just recently developed an online app for this exact purpose and it is using only the Lichess' official Broadcasts as the database, containing mostly OTB games (~ 1.2 million games). Not sure how close it is from what you are looking for, but you will find a lot of features for analysis and searching the database: *https://premovedprep.com/search*
@red_lobster86 searching by player is exactly what I missed for OTB prep, so I ended up building it. Disclosure: I made this one, so weigh it accordingly.
chessprep.org has an Opponent prep page: type a name and you see which openings that player chooses with White and Black, for about 340,000 players with over-the-board games (TWIC, the Lichess broadcasts and the pgnmentor archives). Finding the player is free; the full openings report on a player is part of Premium.
Two tips whichever tool you use:
- For prep, the last 2-3 years matter most. People change their repertoire more often than you'd think.
- Look at how they score in each line, not only what they play. The line they keep losing with is the one to aim for.