Searching

The database is indexed for most popular searches. Retrieval from more than 100 million games can take a while sometimes, not all of the many possible searches can be made lightning fast. If you are looking for very specific data searching and downloading can become (too) slow or even time out. The good news is that you have a few options to speed things up when this happens: Searching for player names, variants, date ranges, results, and/or ECO codes generally is very fast. Adding more restrictions (ratings, time controls etc) can slow things down. Try to stick with the "fast" search criteria whereever possible. You can also just download result sets or entire years at https://www.ficsgames.org/download.html and import them into a database of your choice. Chessbase Reader and Scid are good and free choices for this task. Once you have imported the search results into such a local database program you can easily filter the result set.

Examples

If you are interested in longer games, searching by variant for "standard" will be much faster than searching for a time control. Searching only for rated games is often unnecessary because the database contains only very few unrated games.

Help and Contact

Do you encounter problems retrieving exactly the games you want even when applying these hints? Is the current maximum of 5000 games per query download not enough for your needs? Do you want to do large scale research on the database? We will try and get you the data you need, just drop us an email to fics.ludens@gmail.com