Korchnoi's Career 1945-1977 on Paper

After that month-long digression for the Google portion of Engines, (Google), Korchnoi (December 2016), let's return to the Korchnoi portion. I last worked on it for Korchnoi's Events 2008-15 (November 2016), where I left Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER; 1946-2015) in an unfinished state. The TMER consists of four sections:-

• A career record taken from work done by 'Philidor Press' in the 1970s; see Korchnoi's Career 1946-1977 (June 2016) and Korchnoi's TMER 1946-1977 (July 2016).
• A summary of a 1990s PGN collection from UPITT; see Korchnoi's Events 1977-1996 (August 2016).
• A summary of an early-2000s PGN collection from GMchess; see Korchnoi's Events 1976-2000 (ditto).
• A summary of PGN files extracted from Mark Crowther's TWIC; for the first extract, see Korchnoi's Events 1998-99 / 2014-15 (ditto).

To continue, I decided to look at the games from 'Korchnoi's Chess Games' by Levy & O'Connell (Oxford University Press, 1979, 308 pages). The book has 288 pages of partially annotated game scores in chronological order, followed by 46 pages of crosstables. The games are cross-referenced by an index of openings and an index of opponents. A sample from the first page of opponents is shown in the following image.

I scanned the nine page index of opponents, ran the scans through an OCR converter, and loaded the results into a database. According to a preliminary analysis, the book has 1663 games played against 486 opponents. I'll delve further into this record for my next post.