THE GRANDMASTER CODEX — Game Sources Index

Every game in this book was played by real people (or, in three cases, by neural networks that taught themselves to dream in chess). This index tells you where to find each of the 200 annotated games in its original form — the tournament records, databases, and books that preserved these games before we got our hands on them.

Think of this as the bibliography for the games themselves. If you want to verify a move, see a different annotator's take, or simply explore further, this is your roadmap.

How to Use This Index

Each game entry includes:

• Game number and players — as they appear in the Codex
• Event, year, and result — so you can locate it in any database
• Primary sources — databases and books where the game (and sometimes prior annotations) can be found
• Attribution notes — where existing analysis shaped our commentary, we say so

A note on book references: bracketed numbers (e.g., [25]) refer to page numbers or game numbers within that source, not footnotes in our text. When a game has been annotated dozens of times across a century of chess literature, we cite the most instructive or historically significant treatments.

Volume I: Foundations (Games 1–40)

Rating focus: 0–1000 | The romantic era through the early modern age

Volume II: The Club Player (Games 41–80)

Rating focus: 1000–1600 | Classical battles, defensive masterpieces, and world championship turning points

Volume III: The Tournament Fighter (Games 81–120)

Rating focus: 1600–2200 | Candidates cycles, hypermodern wars, and the first battles against machines

Volume IV: The Expert (Games 121–160)

Rating focus: 2200–2400 | World championship pressure, positional depth, and the women who changed everything

Volume V: The Grandmaster (Games 161–200)

Rating focus: 2400+ | Neural network chess, the modern super-GMs, and the 2024 World Championship

Database Sources

Every game in this collection can be verified through at least one of the following public or commercial databases:

• Lichess Open Database — database.lichess.org — Free, open-source, covers millions of games including recent elite events. Our go-to for post-2020 games.
• Chessgames.com — chessgames.com — The largest freely searchable archive of historical master games, with community annotations and historical context.
• ChessBase Mega Database — The industry-standard commercial database. Over 9 million games with professional annotations. Many of our classical-era references were cross-checked here.
• TWIC (The Week in Chess) — theweekinchess.com — Mark Crowther's weekly PGN bulletins have documented elite chess since 1994. The primary source for tournament games from the mid-1990s onward.
• FIDE game records — fide.com — Official records for world championship matches and FIDE-organized events.
• TCEC Archives — tcec-chess.com — The Top Chess Engine Championship archives, source for engine-vs-engine games including Leela Chess Zero vs Stockfish.
• DeepMind Publications — The AlphaZero games (176–177) were published in Silver et al., "Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm" (2017) and the expanded 2018 paper in Science.

Book Sources (Cited Above)

The following books are referenced in the source tables. Each one is worth owning if you want to go deeper into the games they cover.

Attribution Notes

A few things worth saying plainly:

All annotations in The Grandmaster Codex are original. The analysis, commentary, and instructional framing throughout this book were written by Kit Olivas and Dr. Ada Marie specifically for this work. We did not copy annotations from other books.

Where existing analysis influenced our thinking, we credit it. Chess is a collaborative art. When Bronstein's notes on Zurich 1953 shaped how we explain a position, or when Kasparov's analysis in My Great Predecessors clarified a critical variation, we acknowledge that debt in the source tables above.

Game scores are historical facts. The moves of a chess game — the PGN notation — are part of the public record, like the score of a football match or the text of a court ruling. They are not subject to copyright, and no permission is needed to reproduce them.

Annotations are original creative work. Our explanations, metaphors, teaching frameworks, exercise positions, and instructional scaffolding are original to this Codex. The difference between "1...Qxf3!!" and a two-page explanation of why that queen sacrifice works, when you should look for similar ideas, and how to train your pattern recognition — that's what we built.

The 200 games were selected for instructional value, not comprehensiveness. This is not a "greatest games ever played" anthology. It is a teaching tool. Every game earns its place because it teaches something specific at the right moment in a player's development. Some famous games were omitted because their lessons overlap with games we had already chosen. Some lesser-known games were included because they teach a concept better than any famous alternative.

25 games feature women players. This was a deliberate choice. Judit Polgár, Hou Yifan, Vera Menchik, Ju Wenjun, Koneru Humpy, Rameshbabu Vaishali, Bibisara Assaubayeva, Lei Tingjie, Tan Zhongyi, Aleksandra Goryachkina, Anna Muzychuk, Pia Cramling, Dronavalli Harika, Kateryna Lagno, Mariya Muzychuk, and Antoaneta Stefanova all appear in these pages — not as tokens, but because their games are worth studying. A chess book that pretends women don't play at the highest level is a chess book that's lying to its readers.

Game Sources Index compiled for The Grandmaster Codex Kit Olivas & Dr. Ada Marie — Lelock University Press