What Do Alpa Numerics mean in Opening

mrbluetone

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26 Oct 10

mrbluetone

Joined: 12 May 10
Moves: 4622

26 Oct 10

Hi all,

Could anyone explain what the Alpha/numerics mean that precede the explanantion of the Opening when viewing 'info' on an archived game?

Thanks

mrbluetone

Joined: 12 May 10
Moves: 4622

26 Oct 10

Apologies... here is an example,

C20 KP

Thanks

mwmiller

RHP Member No.16

Joined: 25 Feb 01
Moves: 104453

26 Oct 10

1 edit

Is this what you are asking about?

"C20 King's pawn game"

In this particular example, the C20 is the index or reference number used in the encyclopedia of chess openings to identify the king's pawn opening. The ECO is a huge database of chess openings and the alpha-numeric codes are helpful for indexing them.

I hope this helped.

mrbluetone

Joined: 12 May 10
Moves: 4622

26 Oct 10

Excellent...I didn't know there was such a reference index, let alone that I was playing them by accident!

Thanks for the info.

lundybishop

Joined: 18 Mar 10
Moves: 29673

26 Oct 10

The Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings (ECO) was originally a 5 volume book on chess openings. Volume A covered Flank openings, B semi open games, C open, D closed and E indian openings. Each volume was then sub divided into 100 different categories from 00-99.

Shallow Blue

Joined: 18 Jan 07
Moves: 12477

28 Oct 10

Originally posted by mrbluetone
Excellent...I didn't know there was such a reference index, let alone that I was playing them by accident!

That's no accident. There is basically no way (except resigning before move 1) to not play an opening from ECO. Even if you do something daft like 1. f3, that's covered under A00. And if you play anything even remotely reasonable, it will have been played before and fall under one opening or another - possibly a rare one, but a known opening with a non-A00 ECO code nevertheless.

Richard

lundybishop

Joined: 18 Mar 10
Moves: 29673

28 Oct 10

A nice feature on this site is being able to look up all your finished games sorted by their ECO codes, using My Games-Search For Games-Enhanced Search. So if you want to see how well you have done with a particlular opening you can pull out all games that you have played by putting in the ECO code for that opening.