---

Copyright ©

2 Sep 2006
-
 I wanted a large pool of positions covering most reasonable openings that could be used to create test sets for various purposes. 
 Where to get a large but managable set of positions in a relatively short amount of time was a real problem. 
 From a large data base, no thanks. 
 From MCO or NCO, not practicle, as months and months would be needed to wade thru all the massive amount of lines and notes. 
 Also many lines went way past the opening and deciding where to stop would itself be time consuming. 
 And there are just to many interesting lines hidden in the notes, adding to the complexity of the task. 
 No answer to this delema was apparent.
-
 Then I remembered that I had a copy of 'Chess Openings the Easy Way' by Nick de Firmian. 
 It was a very good answer. 
 His book had only 910 colums that mostly ended in the late opening or early middlegame with relativly few notes. 
 To save time and get this task done in less than two weeks of free time I decided to enter only the colums and nothing else. 
 This reduced the amount of thinking on my part to almost nothing. I did not have to decide which notes to include and which to exclude, thus reducing the time needed greatly as well as my proclivity to err. 
 For a well rounded base from which to collect test sets, it is not neccesary to have all the positions from the book. 
 So I just defer to the author who is rated ~800 points higher than myself and trust that he had good reasons for what he included in the colums. 
 Having said that though I realize that there are final positions that are not good for any test set and that many notes might be very good. Therefore, I recommend to anyone using this set of positions to also purchase the book. 
 When you spy an interesting position to add to a test set, you will then be able to reference the book and search the notes for interesting alternatives as well as see the authors evaluation.
-
 When looking for positions to include in a test set, it is recommended to run each line forward and backward to find the most appropiate position from wich to start play. 
 I did not try to make that decision for you. 
 You know your needs better than I know them. 
 This is not meant to be a test set in and of itself, but, rather a resource for the user to draw from inorder to create their own. 
 I hope that people find the EasyWay.pgn file useful.

Mike

© COPYRIGHT 2001 - 2012 All Rights Reserved wbec-ridderkerk.nl