Where are the rating graphs?

On the Search Page, enter the player name into the name field and hit the Statistics Button. Click on any link in the "Ratings & Statistics" column to see rating graphs for different periods and variants.

My last game is missing/why is my rating not the same as on FICS?

The last game is contained in the FICS Games Database, it operates in real time and stores every game as soon as it is finished. Games are stored using the "smoves" command on FICS which shows the player's pre-game rating (on FICS, try "smoves -1"). Therefore, your rating on the FICS games database will be the rating you had when you started your most recent game played.

How many players play on FICS? How many games are played?

Check the statistics section, for the individual years you will find the number of active players in that year, on the "All Years" tab there is a link "Players and games per year"

Which openings are played on FICS?

Check the Opening explorer, it contains all openings played on FICS with a player average rating of > 2000. Also, you can check any player's opening statistics: Go to the Search Page, enter the player name into the Name field and hit the Statistics button. On the resulting page, click on any of the links in the Frequent Openings & Opening Performance column. They will show frequent openings played by that player as white and black as well as the achieved performance

The search is slow or times out on me

Have a look at the search hints

Where can I download games?

You have two options:
- On the Search Page you can download up to 5000 games for any custom query which match your search criteria
- On the Download Page you can download game collections filtered by variant, year and player, for example all standard games played in 2011.

What do these comments {[%emt 1.159]} in the movelist mean?

%emt stands for elapsed move time (the time in seconds it took the player to make the move on FICS), see the PGN specification Supplement. If you don't need this information you can view and download the games without move time information.

I can't import the downloaded pgn files into my viewer/database/chess interface!

Parsing PGN files can be tricky, some parsers are picky or plain broken. The ficsgames database output tries to stick to the original PGN specification as close as possible. If you encounter problems drop us a note, there might be a fix.

How can I analyze games?

Hit the annotate link (on the search result page) or button (when viewing a game). A few minutes later game annotations with engine analysis will be available. We are currently using crafty 23.1

How can I do this? Where can I find that?

Can't find what you are looking for? Not sure what some numbers or graphs mean? Questions or answers are missing? Contact seberg or Ludens at FICS or just drop us an email to fics.ludens@gmail.com