Book Window

Opening Books are small databases recording moves at the start of a game and how often each move occurs. Scid's Book Window allows perusal of opening books, and a few extra features.

Scid uses the popular Polyglot book format, and comes with a few databases already installed, including gm2600.bin and Elo2400.bin.

Features

In Scid vs. PC, two books can be viewed at once. Normally, moves are listed in order of weight, but selecting the Alphabetical box will sort them, placing like moves side-by-side.

The Other Moves button shows moves not in the book, but which lead to book positions.

See also the Book Tuning feature.

Polyglot

Scid comes with an altered version of Polyglot. The below features require the full version of the command line tool.

Making Opening Books

First, remove games with non-standard starts. These can be found by searching for games with the "non-standard start" flag. Then, negate the filter, export the games to PGN, and from the command line:
polyglot make-book -pgn GAMES.PGN -bin BOOK.BIN -min-game 1 -max-ply 30
See the polyglot documentation for more options.

Merging Two Books

polyglot merge-book -in1 w.bin -in2 b.bin out book.bin