MJMcCready wrote: ↑Sun Jun 15, 2025 3:20 am
Greetings, I have been looking at my favourite website, that being britbase, muchly of late. Mostly I have been looking at the games of particular players around 1890-1910. I have noticed that there are sometimes incomplete games, somtimes only one or two moves have been recorded. How many reasons are there for this? Is it that the gamescore wasn't submitted or became lost after being submitted? Are games sometimes reported incorrectly? I was looking in particular at a game in the 1905 British championship between William Ward and Reginald Pryce Mitchell (game 60), which only has two recorded moves and was curious to know why that might be the case.
I'm glad you like BritBase. Re your questions, most have an obvious answer.
Yes, there are lots of incomplete games over the years. I can't tell you precisely why but I can guess various reasons. At the end of a game, unless instructed otherwise, players put their scoresheets in their pockets and leave. It's up to the organisers to provide duplicate scoresheets or ask players to hand in the scores or whatever. If they don't do that, then the game score will only see the light of day if the player chooses to share it with someone. Alternatively, if an assiduous chess journalist is present at a tournament, they might approach players for sight of their scoresheets, or take notes of games in progress. I suspect the pre-WW1 columnist for
The Field, Leopold Hoffer, did something of that sort, as probably did Times columnists Samuel Tinsley and his son Edward (who wasn't much of a player but an excellent note-taker for which all UK chess history buffs should all be grateful).
I imagine what might have happened occasionally is that a journo present at a venue would ask an arbiter if he could take away the scoresheets. The arbiter might not be bothered and let them take them all. The journo would then take them home or to their office, sift through for a handful of publishable games and then bin the rest. This would of course prevent any other journo from getting their hands on them.
Good as the aforementioned gentlemen were at providing us with games from their era, the patron saint of game score collectors was
Bernhard Kagan (1866-1932) who was responsible for collecting and publishing copious quantities of games from major continental events. His work explains why there are so many games from old German tournaments compared to our own relatively sparse collection of early British Championship games. (But, on the other hand, if some early Brits had done as well as Kagan, then we 21st century people wouldn't have had all the fun of tracking them down.)
As for the accuracy of scores, that also has an easy answer. The mistakes are all there, waiting to be found, as Tartakower might have said if he had been a game inputter. The mistakes start with the players. Their priority is playing good moves, not keeping score, so their scores are full of all kinds of errors and omissions. The scores then pass through the hands of bulletin editors and journalists, who might correct some of the errors but also generate a few of their own. Then magazine and book editors and game inputters get to work and the same applies. It's nobody's fault, it's just the way it is. Eventually people like me come along and try to fix the errors. I fix a few, but of course I'm bound to make mistakes of my own. As the late Stewart Reuben interpolated in a note in a chapter I wrote on a similar subject for one of his Chess Organisers' Handbook editions, "there are always mistakes". Of course he was right.
Incidentally, please don't imagine that the great names of chess are immune from this phenomenon. They too make scoring mistakes, possibly putting too much trust in their memories. Alekhine certainly had a wonderful memory but some of his published game scores differed from primary sources. I came across a similar problem the other day with the score of
Karpov-R.Byrne, Hastings 1971/72. The primary/contemporary sources all agreed on the score of the game but then a few years later along came the book
Anatoly Karpov: Chess is My Life by Anatoly Karpov & Aleksandr Roshal (Pergamon, 1980) with some different moves 27-32. Cutting a long story short, I think the Karpov/Roshal book has the score wrong.
Re stubs in databases: some people like them, some don't (Chessgames dot com only include complete or near-complete game scores). I find them useful for various reasons: (1) they can be used to help generate crosstables; (2) they can help to generate other stats such as head-to-head scores between notable players; (3) they highlight research work which is still to be done; (4) they can include interesting background info relating to the game or occasion; (5) they help create a timeline for an individual player's chess activity.
BritBase is a collaborative project and I'm always grateful for help.
I've listed contributors to it here. If your name isn't on it, ask not what BritBase can do for you - ask what you can do for BritBase.