Chess opening names
An aggregated data set of chess opening names.
| field | / |
dist/ |
description |
|---|---|---|---|
| eco | x | x | ECO classification |
| name | x | x | Opening name (English language) |
| pgn | x | x | Well known sequence of moves, or the most common moves to reach the opening position based on master games, as PGN |
| uci | x | Same moves as pgn in UCI notation |
|
| epd | x | EPD (FEN without move numbers) of the opening position, en passant field only if legal |
To generate dist/, install Python, then pip3 install chess and run make.
Or select the latest
workflow run and
download build artifacts.
This dataset is also available in the Apache Parquet format.
Conventions
- Title case is used for opening names.
- Names are structured like
Opening family: Variation, Subvariation, ..., e.g.,Sicilian Defense: Najdorf Variation, English Attack. - The suggested way to classify games is to play moves backwards until a named position is found. To make this work well with common transpositions, multiple entries for a single opening may be added.
- However, each name has a unique shortest line. If necessary,
a distinguishing move is appended, e.g.,
King's Gambit Accepted: Schurig Gambit, with Bb5.
Contributing
Opening data is in a.tsv, b.tsv, c.tsv, d.tsv, and e.tsv.
Improvements, additions and fixes are welcome. If you have concrete suggestions, please be bold and submit the proposed changes directly as pull requests!
The changes will be live on lichess.org after the next update of scalachess (no fixed schedule) and the opening explorer (daily).
Copyright
As a collection of facts, this data set is in the public domain. Considerable effort was spent curating and cleaning the data. Insofar as that qualifies for copyright, the work is released under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
