what games databases do you use?

Hi everyone. I'm deciding to follow the ICS instructions on studying the openings, namely, find 30-100 games and then choosing a couple as model games. I'm wondering what databases people use to find those 30-100 games? I just finished the lesson on the Dutch defense and was finding games on chessgames dot com but I noticed that there aren't many recent Dutch defense games there and there are many different variations (I haven't seen one with 2. Nc3). I don't think most of the games on chessgames dot com are annotated very well, so they won't be very good model games if I have to rely only on my own analysis So I'm wondering what you guys do to studying these openings? I want to try to find a free source/method, since I already purchased this class and I'm hesitating to purchase more stuff unless it's extremely important....Thanks

I recently switched from Chess Assistant to Chessbase. Both gold standards and relatively expensive.

The latest release of Aquarium Houdini now includes the Chess Assistant hugebase with about 5M games and weekly updates for about $60 us. That's about the best non free package I've seen anywhere. (I've used aquarium as my primary analysis tool for a couple of years, so I'm somewhat biased).

Aquarium has only basic database management tools, but if you're only interested in the opening preparation it's more than adequate, and when coupled with the IdEA tools it's head of the class. You will find IdEA extremely useful when studying the exercises during months 9-13 (after solving the problems yourself and looking at the ICS solutions first of course).

If you have any of the playing programs they all include a lot of games, and you can add games from chessopeningpgn.com. a free website. (I personally haven't used the site, if you decide to try it give us some feedback).

You won't find all that many annotated games, but I'd suggest that using what you know from the ICS material it might be more useful to annotate games yourself with help from any of the computer playing programs, most of which include powerful analysis tools.

Chesspublishing.com is a premium site with exclusively annotated games, but you're looking at about $100/yr subscription fees and you will find some, but not much, overlap with the ICS repertoire.

Thanks for the reply PawnCustodian, what is IdEA? I did a google search for IdEA chess and got www dot ideachess dot com . Does Chess Assistant have a lot of annotated games or is it basically just a large database of games? I have Fritz 12 and I just realized last night that it's got quite a collection of games as well so I'll probably start with that for now.

You can find a lot of info on Interactive Deep Analysis (IdEA) at chessok.com and articles in the archives at Chess Cafe. There are annotated games with Chess Assistant, but most are not.

Fritz 12 is my favorite playing program and has a pretty good game analysis capabily.

One great Fritz feature is it's ability to import the ICS opening repertoire chessbase files as a opening book and you have a quick way to practice your repertoire! Once you created the book you can also run engine tournaments to get games for those lines that are not well represented in the games databases.

Like verbenaca i go on chessgames.com, choose some player and there is an array at the beginning of the page to choose which opening to explore for this player.
Then i run a few games with the same opening just to see the games variations, and you gain some ideas, either by seeing that some moves are important and always repeated from game to game, either by picking up an uncommon variation that impresses me.

Over time i find more benefit in unbalanced games, where one player overplay his opponent, because it shows where the mistakes are (and that just mistakes i'm doing the most, so...), while a gm vs gm involves too much good moves in a row for me to be able to reproduce OTB.

It's interesting also to focus on players that have a specific style but did not particularly had a brillant carrier, because they try things that one time works brillantly, other time fails dramatically, i like this better than tight games.
I give you an example: instead of reveiwing all Tal games, have a look at Nezhmetdinov (same style, he actually influenced Tal but was never as performant), nevertheless some miniatures are very instructive (e.g. nezhmetdinov_sergievsky_1966 or even nezhmetdinov_tal_1961).

I use scid database....