Context

Chess has been a game that I've loved since I started when I was 7 (2nd grade). Since then, I've achieved a peak USCF rating of 1778 (albeit I've been quite inactive in competitive play), and a 2000+ Bullet/Blitz rating on Lichess. Now, I've wanted to synthesize my love for chess with my love for coding and sharing into this dataset, which hopefully can help & inspire others who are interested in both chess and coding like me!

Content

games (folder): The primary content in this dataset is the almost million chess games loaded from chessgames.com. Each csv file represents 1000 games, with the ending number being the games' starting ID. For example, if we have the file ../master_games1012000.csv, then this file will have all the games from ID 1012000 to ID 1012000 + 1000 = 1013000.

ratings (folder): This is a folder with Chess ELOs dating back to the late 19th century compiled by Jeff Sonas on his excellent chessmetrics website. Only ELOs up to the year 2005 are included in his dataset though, so any year after must be supplemented by ratings found in the primary data. Additionally, for this folder, the ending of each csv file represents the games' ending ID. For example, if we have the file ../ratings100000.csv, then this file will have ratings from ID ...90000... to ...100000....

openings (csv): Supplementary file with the relation ECO -> Opening Name.

Acknowledgements

All of the data used was scraped using code which can be found in my github repository for this project. There are in-depth descriptions for each of the files in the repo, so feel free to fork the code and play around with it however you would like. If you like my work, feel free to drop a follow as well :)

Side Note

Not every chess game on chessgames.com was able to be scraped (approximately 100-300 games not scraped). Be careful of that when analyzing specific chess games.