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I made my first acquaintance with these CDs with the arrival of MegaCorr3, a large database of more than 525,000 correspondence chess games. In addition this CD included over fifty issues of Chess Mail, (1996-2002) and 79 issues of Kibitzer column (The Kibitzer is Harding’s column on Chess Café website, and deals with chess history, opening theory and current affairs in chess.) There were separate sections on world championships, Olympiads, European championships and other tournaments, each with complete games. Harding’s own modest appeal to the readers was not without humour:
MegaCorr4 had over 725,000 correspondence games on the database. A special bonus was the PDF e-book of Tim Harding's 1996 work, Winning at Correspondence Chess and Chess Mail issues (April 1997 to May 2005) in 9 volumes. In my view both MegaCorr3 and MegaCorr4 are collector’s items on account of this magazine, a wonderful window to the world of correspondence chess. It is a pity that it has folded up. My present copy of UltraCorr CD has a database of 811,246 correspondence chess games in ChessBase format. As a bonus, it also offers Chess Mail volume 9 (2005 issues) in PDF format. It also includes a large file of Tim Harding's annotated correspondence games. What should be of interest to OTB players is that great masters of the past like Chigorin, Alekhine and Keres were active CC players. Their example was followed by Ragozin and Simagin among others. All available games of these players can be found in this database: Chigorin(43),Alekhine (88), Keres(120), Ragozin(41) and Simagin (62). Among the CC world champions, the games of Sanakoev, Umansky, Timmerman and Hamarat should be of great value.
Correspondence chess abounds in opening experiments and theoretical novelties. It is well-known that CC players are well-acquainted with theory and practice of OTB chess. So their innovations are deep and many of them have stood the test of time. One can study the rise and fall of any critical variation with the help of the search function in this database. It is worth the value of several opening books. The current CC world champion is Joop Van Oosteroom, the well-known patron of the famous Melody Amber tournament. He has also supported a number of CC tournaments. He is a powerful attacking player and the following game is taken from the database. Van Kempen - Van
Oosterom[B90] Annotations based on Harding’s commentary.
Highly Recommended.
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Tim
Harding, editor and publisher, Chess Mail Ltd.has announced that a new
correspondence chess CD, UltraCorr2 would be released soon.
On this database 86,564 games carry some
comment or the other. Out of this lot, 15,450 games are richly
annotated (many by Harding himself) with the right blend of explanatory
prose and interesting variations.
