I don't really dont like 3.d5 for this reason that Phobetor states: "Black can get space immediately with 3... f5 which also seems to be very ok for black. For example 4. e4 fxe4 5. Nc3 Nf6 6. Ne2 Bf5 7. Ng3 Bg6 8. Bg5 Be7 when I doubt white has a real advantage."

You can probably find them here:

Java chess games: database search, analysis
ChessGames.com Online Chess Games Database

If you want to have your game annotated for you:

DBQuery

Lately I have been using two databases to find all the games which occur in my books. One is the 2.9 million game database at:
ICOfY .NET - ICOfY Base


I also use twicmill which is a combination of the million game database located at Ed Schroeder's site:

Download PGN

plus all of the twic data at
The Week in Chess and
The Week in Chess
plus the twic data that I downloaded in the 1990s.

For the convenience of chess forums users you can get all of these games using the following two downloads which will bring you up to issue 663:
RapidShare: 1-Click Webhosting
RapidShare: 1-Click Webhosting

Links to the above can be found on my webpage:

Downloads

Crash

Crash

Wow I gotta give you another thanks for that - theres a heap of really useful links there.

Do yourself a HUGE!!!! favour and Download SCID
Scid - Downloads

There's a bit of a learning curve but it is really worth it. It handles millions of games with nary a hiccup. Make sure you import the pgn databases into native SCID format so as to speed things up significantly.

Links are also available at:

Downloads

Once you have SCID you can create text and html opening reports and theory tables like the ones available from:

Chess

An example of an opening report with ECO style theory table:
A42h_w_Be3

Just the Theory Table:
Theory Table

Crash

You're welcome. One thing that really helped me improve rapidly last time I returned to chess was using chess databases of grandmaster games to speed the learning process and also to help me study the openings and middlegames arising out of them.

Scid lets you create repetoire files of all of your openings (usually you might do one for White and a second for Black). With these repetoire files you can quickly scan any new database such as the current week's TWIC files to discover games and new developments in your favourite openings.

The one problem that we have is information overload but you can cut down on the clutter by doing a search based on rating and cut off the games at games with players rated 2500 or 2600 or even 2700. You will improve the quality of the games that you are looking at and still have lots of games to look at in each opening. I also like to export databases to smaller working databases to speed up processing. I will export a database and delete it when I am done with it. If you aren't careful and don't delete you will fill up your hard drive.

Twicmill and ICOFY seem to give you all the info you need. I actually took all of the big databases on that Lars Balzer site and combined them and then did a dedupe on them and only got about 100,000 more games with some unknown level of duplication. I think that the dos chessbase utilities available do a better job of killing doubles.

Once you get above 4,000,000 games SCID seems to slow down significantly at least on my system which is a 2.8 Ghz dual processor based system with 2 Gigs of Ram. I suspect that this is because you have to start going to disk with pgn data as you run out of physical memory. Mind you, it is impossible for you to study 4 million games so anything above 200,000 games will probably be sufficient for all but the most demanding of us.

The handy thing about ICOFY is that you can find data on prospective opponents down into the class levels. I found 80 games of my own in the various databases.

Now you are all armed as well as me when it comes to chess databases.

Crash

I've tried some of these lines on FICS, and had two games tonight with people around my rating. Blitz of course, so nothing serious. I'm liking that exchange queens line a lot!

The 1. d4 d6 2. c4 e5 3.dxe dxe 4.QxQ, KxQ. I had the better endgames ... Clearly this means nothing at my level, but I may soon be a believer. For a bonus ... I had another game where the guy transposed into the Pirc. That was a miserable failure. Then again, I haven't really looked at the Pirc outside of the fianchettoed bishop.

Then there's this: Nigel Short: Playing the Pirc is a bit like wearing flares and platform shoes. One may have done it once, but one does not wish to be reminded of the fact.