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I'm looking for a database or a collection of the chess results of all FIDE-rated games (standard time control). The data I'm interested in is: the white player, the black player, the result and the date for each game. I've checked the FIDE-website, however, I could only find the published rating lists.

Is such a collection available? If so, where would I be able to download it? Thanks in advance!

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  • Big Database or TWIC would be the way to go. For TWIC (this week in chess) you can go on their site and download the pgns.
    – Inertial Ignorance
    Commented Sep 28, 2019 at 23:29
  • True, a large portion of the data I'm looking for can be retrieved from these databases. However, they often don't contain rapid or blitz games, or standard games played in the "lower" leagues. Moreover, these databases sometimes even contain games that are not FIDE-rated, for example "Ultimate Blitz Challenge" chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=87292.
    – Maxwell86
    Commented Sep 30, 2019 at 7:59

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I'm looking for a database or a collection of the chess results of all FIDE-rated games (standard time control).

Such a database exists but only on FIDE's computers and they don't make the data easily available in its entirety.

The data is available but you have to select and download one tournament at a time. Here's how:

Go to the FIDE Ratings Archive page. There you have the ability to Browse Rated tournaments by country. You select a federation from a drop-down list and a period from another drop-down list and click on the "go" button. For instance if you select "Russia" and "April 2019" then you get this page.

The first two tournaments are rapid tournaments but the third looks like a standard tournament. On the end of the row of that tournament there is a hyperlink "inf" for information. If you click on it then you get the general tournament information including time control and, indeed, it is

Standard: 90 minutes with 30 second increment from move 1

Scroll down a bit further and there is a crosstable element with a blueish icon next to it. Click on it and you get the results of all the games in the tournament.

If you go back to the page with the list of tournaments for Russia for April 2019 you see similar blueish icons on the left side of the page next to the tournament names. These will take you to the same place more quickly.

If you are determined to get all the results going back to July 2001 then you can do so by building your own web crawler to navigate the site automatically and screen scrape the cross table pages for all the tournaments in all the periods for all of the federations, extract the data you want and build your own database.

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  • Indeed, this way I would get the data I'm interested in, thanks! I wonder, writing a web crawler, how much work would that be? I have no experience, but it looks not trivial... :-D
    – Maxwell86
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 5:32
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    I have a crawler that downloads tournament information for country and a rating period. I use it to build Excel files with stats about tournaments and arbiters (I am an arbiter myself). Perhaps it could be useful for you: pypi.org/project/fideparser
    – Mikel Larreategi
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 6:07
  • @MikelLarreategi Thanks for the suggestion, I'll definitely take a look at it!
    – Maxwell86
    Commented Apr 12, 2019 at 11:29

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