CBRATE 0.1  Copyright Rob Weir, 1996

CompuServe: 71165,2722
Internet: rweir@cybercom.net

This program is free for personal use.

CBRATE is a WIN32 program, so you must be running Windows 95 or NT to use it!

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WARNING: This program modifies ChessBase data files, something quite difficult,
and quite undocumented.  This program seems to work for me, but don't you think
it would be better if you made a backup of your BIG ChessBase database before 
using me?!
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Files you now have:

CBRATE.TXT   the file you are reading
CBRATE.EXE   the CBRATE program
CBRATE.DAT   the data file for CBRATE

You also need to download MSVCRT40.DLL and put it in your \Windows\System directory
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CBRATE adds Elo ratings for player to games which are missing ratings.  CBRATE uses
a text-file, called CBRATE, listing historical ratings for players rated greater than 2400.

A typical entry looks like this:

"Agdestein,S"
1987,2560
1988,2571
1989,2601
1990,2600
1991,2590
1992,2601
1993,2610
1994,2595


Here you can see the name and rating history for the player over a portion of his career.
I collected this data by writing a program which scanned over one million ChessBase games from
a variety of sources and calculated the average rating for each player for each year.  I then extracted
those players with ratings over 2400 and cleaned up the entries by hand.  Obviously, these numbers are
approximations.  For ChessBase users looking for precise historical rating information, this will not be
sufficient.  However, users interested in add ratings to their data so they can then more intelligently 
"separate the wheat from the chaff", CBRATE can be very useful.


To run CBRATE is easy.  You just give it the name of one or more ChessBase databases like this:

CBRATE c:\data\mainbase.cbf

or 

CBRATE c:\temp\*.cbf


CBRATE then loads the CBRATE.DAT file and for each game missing ratings, looks for the player's name in the list
of known players.  If it finds both the correct name and year, it adds the rating to the game.


You can also run in a "Practice Mode" where no changes will be written to your database, but instead a list
of what would have benn changes will be displayed.  Practice Mode is used like this:

CBRATE -practice c:\data\mainbase.cbf


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