In our previous article, we told you about Ed Schröder, a pioneer in chess programming. At 75 he is now in semi-retirement, but has placed his super-aggressive engines as freeware online, and is also engaged in a project that is of great interest. Here’s what he told us in the second part of the interview we conducted:
Frederic Friedel: Apart from engine programming, I know you have developed a tool that can evaluate and extract especially games from general databases?
Ed Schröder: The tool is called Best of Chess. It extracts the most spectacular games from a PGN database, with each game evaluated on three features:
- King Attack
- Material Sacrifice
- Length of the game (the smaller the number of moves in a game the higher the bonus).
If a game exceeds the total bonus of 10.000 points the game is stored in a new PGN file called Best-of-Chess.pgn.
If a game exceeds the total bonus of 10,000 points, the game is stored in a new PGN file called Best-of-Chess.pgn. The following example is a game extracted from ChessBase MegaBase-2025, played in 1855:
The game is output with the following extra PGN tags:
[Event “Best of Chess”]
[Site “King-Attacks, Sacrifices, Short Games”]
[King “7440”] * King Attack evaluation
[Short “7400”] * Short Game bonus
[Sac “18000”] * Pawn units sacrificed – 18 in this game
[Total “32840”] * Total evaluation
Here are the first 100 games I extracted from Mega Database 2025. A total of 4,615 game were found, from 1610 to 2024. Paul Morphy tops the list – not a big surprise. He is followed by the players of his time when chess was romantic, the kind of games that made me fall in love with chess as a teenager. The games are in historical order, so the 100 games shown In the replayer [click on the blue arrow pointing right] are historically the oldest.
And here are PGNs of the best games of Morphy (49 games), Anderssen (92 games), Fischer (30 games), Karpov (40 games), Kasparov (66 games) and Carlsen (117 games). The games were evaluated on the basis of 1) king attack, 2) sacrifices and 3) shortness (length) of a game.
In the following replayers you can see the results for Adolf Anderssen and Garry Kasparov. Note that the first two of Anderssen’s games, sorted by sacrifices, are his two immortal games.
Computers
When evaluating computers, Fritz 20 came as a big surprise by doing extremely well on king attacks. Here are the results of the top engines in this category:
| # | Total | Attack | % | Engine |
| 1 | 82257 | 45503 | 17.5% | Fritz 20 |
| 2 | 53745 | 25743 | 10.4% | Stockfish 17.1 |
| 3 | 43219 | 19659 | 9.2% | Alexandria 8.0 |
| 4 | 43131 | 20268 | 9.1% | Obsidian 15 |
| 5 | 41270 | 18640 | 6.3% | PlentyChess 5.0 |
| 6 | 39341 | 17470 | 8.6% | Integral 7.0 |
| 7 | 38639 | 18970 | 8.2% | Starzix 6.0 |
| 8 | 37386 | 18616 | 9.2% | Torch 3.1 |
| 9 | 35552 | 19520 | 9.0% | Horsie 1.1 |
| 10 | 34165 | 21271 | 5.8% | KomodoDragon 3.3 |
Here an example of a Fritz20 brilliancy:
And here’s a zip file with PGNs of the best 975 games of Fritz 20, out of a collection of 65,000, sorted according to sacrifices, shortness and king attacks.
And here are the best games of Rebel-Extreme
FF: Thank you, Ed, please keep us briefed on your results and the progress you make.
