Does anybody know a good site to download early game collections? I was going through Fritz 10, and finding that its database is not so hot for such things. It starts off with one Greco analysis, two Philidor games, three phony Napoleon games, a couple of LaBourdonnais', a couple of Stauntons, and we're up to London 1851 by game 20 in the database.

What I was doing was taking a couple of game collections, and trying to create .pgn files of every game in the book for easier study, and finding that far too many of them just weren't in Fritz. A quick check showed that of the 1.1 million games in its database, 90% of them were played after 1980.

What I'm looking for is a kind of one-stop shopping place to download a .pgn of, say, all known games played before 1900 (there can't be all that many). And maybe another for 1901-1979, or something like that.

I am almost sure that my Alte_Meister (old masters) database is not 100% complete either, but it's the best I can offer. It has 68533 games up to 1960, but not very many games before 1851.

http://remixshare.com/dl/u6a7o/OldMasters.zip

(very short delay, then you can download)

Source: Norm Pollock's collection

It only goes back to 1880, but still, it looks like there is some other good stuff in here worth having.

So, that brings up another question. What's the best chess database? (Secondary question: What's the best free chess database?) I usually use the Fritz database, but I'm going through my hard drive, and finding old .pgn files I downloaded years ago. 2000 Smyslov games. 400 Anderssen games, and things like that. I'd love to put all these various and sundry files together, without loading it up with duplicates. And I'm afraid to toss these big files now because they might have one or two games that I don't already have, that I'll go digging for some day and not find in Fritz. I'd really like a way to combine them all into one big .pgn, weed out the duplicates, and get them sorted in order.