23 January 2019

Acknowledging an Important Source

The first point I want to tackle from my previous post, Small Projects for 2019, is:-
In December I received an email asking for clarification about certain points related to my page, 1862 London Tournament.

For reference, here's the link to the page: 1862 London Tournament (m-w.com). The essence of the email was the following exchange:-

Q: What was the source of your crosstable? Do the forfeited games [in the PGN file] indicate black forfeited all of them as the result indicates or is it just a listing of games not played? • A: The files you mention were created in January 1999. The source was Gelo's 'Chess World Championships 1834-1984' (McFarland 1988). The forfeits are indicated in the book without showing color; it was my choice to build the forfeit file by assigning the win to the first named player.

For further reference, the most recent edition of the book is available on Amazon.com, Chess World Championships by James H. Gelo, subtitled 'All the Games, All With Diagrams 1834-2004. Two Volume Set. 3rd Edition'. The copy I worked from 20 years ago was the 'Second printing, corrected (1995)'.

While I was researching the email, I realized that I had never acknowledged the source of my page for 1862 London. Here's a copy of the tournament crosstable given in Gelo's book (chapter 17), slightly reformatted.

This crosstable is more informative than mine, because it indicates all the draws and forfeits played in the tournament. I build all of my crosstables by collecting the games in PGN format, generating a crosstable from the PGN, and checking the generated crosstable against another source. The earliest events were checked against Gelo. I'll try to establish which ones in a follow-up post.

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