We alert readers to a special offer from Tim Harding’s Chess Mail website:
For just a few more days, to celebrate Tim Harding’s 70th birthday this weekend, the Ultracorr2018 correspondence game database is on offer at ChessMail for just 35 Euro. The offer ends on 8 May. After that the database will be completely withdrawn from sale so that Tim can concentrate on writing his next book. We do not intend to offer a new version until 2019, if ever.
With over 1,830,000 games, UltraCorr-2018 is the largest and most accurate correspondence chess game database ever published. Up to 8 May you can still buy it for €35. There are many more games and considerable data improvements compared with our August 2017 version and some updates compared with the February 2018 release. There will be no new version until early 2019 (if at all) because Tim Harding is now very busy with literary work. UltraCorr-2018 includes all the major ICCF tournaments which ChessBase are advertising as selling points for their collection.
Our latest update includes ICCF, BdF and IECC games to February 2018 and an extensive re-edit of historic games from the BdF and other archives, correcting a lot of player and tournament metadata and eliminating thousands of duplicates, doubtful and spurious games which have found their way into last year’s release.
Our UltraCorr-X database was first issued in mid-August 2017 and a slightly improved revised version was released mid-September. We continued to collect games from various sources up to the end of January 2018, and extensive editing was done since to prepare this new release, including adding the February games.
Even if you are not a correspondence player, you need a large and up-to-date CC database to discover the latest opening ideas, tested in deep analysis by strong players working in tandem with chess computers. Many of the authors for the Quality Chess publishing company, for example, keep a close eye on developments in master correspondence chess and quote CC games in their books.
If you are a correspondence player, you also need UltraCorr-2018 to find games by your upcoming opponents. You can prepare for your games by studying their opening repertoires and can use the database to find their weaknesses. If you are interested in the history of chess, and of CC in particular, you will also find that UltraCorr-2018 includes many thousands of games from the postal chess era which are hard to find elsewhere.
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