Korchnoi's Career 1976-2000, One View

My ongoing project to construct Viktor Korchnoi's Tournament, Match, and Exhibition Record (TMER; 1946-2015), currently has three sections, each section covering a different period of his career:-

• 1945-1977 (the Soviet period)
• 1976-2000 (the pre-Internet period)
• 1998-2015 (the TWIC period)

I'll eliminate the overlaps when I merge the three sections into a single table. Last week I worked on the first section, as documented in Korchnoi's Career 1945-1977, Three Views.

To make progress for the period 1945-1977, I need to work only with the Levy & O'Connell material (on paper) and the GMchess data. The UPITT data can be ignored for now.

Two weeks ago I worked on the second section, Korchnoi's TMER 1976-2000, comparing the GMchess data and the UPITT data for that period.

[I had] two tables covering the period 1976-2000, which was one too many. I combined them into a single table and updated the TMER accordingly. While the result is far from perfect, it's still better than what I had before.

That single table was in fact two columns where an event in column A (GMchess) corresponded to an event in column B (UPITT). This week I collapsed the two columns into a single column by rectifying differences between the columns. When it comes to identifying chess events, there are two pieces of information that can create discrepancies:-

• The year, esp. when an event starts in one year and ends in another.
• The venue, when a locality goes by different names.

Neither of the two columns provided a complete record of Korchnoi's career, because small events like weekend team tournaments can easily slip through the cracks. At some point I'll have to come back to these, but they can be ignored for now.

Next step: Assign months to the various events. At the same time, create a list of external references for the events.