See here.

It was John Saunders who was behind the idea of creating national chess databases with his excellent BritBase. A lot of people followed him creating parallel databases for their native countries. The most common naming system was -base suffix added to the country code, so GerBase, ARG-Base, BelgaBase etc. Following this rule and, given the fact the site used to deal with the Olympiad history exclusively, I called it OlimpBase, written with capital B and with no space inside. I agree with those who claim that OlympBase would sound better, but who cares now. Those days the name sounds somehow obsolete. It should rather be TeamBase or sort of that. Yet, due to reasons with historical, sentimental and marketing background I decided to leave the name unchanged.

No, OlimpBase is fully independent project with no support from FIDE. However, we strongly support the idea of uniting chess community under one flag. FIDE logo in our background symbolizes our endorsement for the unity of world chess.

Never. OlimpBase is, and will always be, growing project, always open for new data from past and present. Our range of interest has grown rapidly recently and it will take long months of arduous work to fill in all the gaps.

Yes. One of them is the Chess Award. The other one is the Golden Web Award won in 2004.

You are right. They are twins. The only difference is that site map uses plain HTML and does not require JavaScript. Some people do not like using JavaScript and turn it off. Site map is designed to help them navigate OlimpBase.

Click the Final Group tag at the top of the table. Find the picture attached below to learn how to do that. You may want to ask, why is it labelled Final Group not just Results or Standings. This is to keep consistency with other events. Only round robin and Swiss events see only one group. A lot of events are two stage giants: preliminaries followed by number of respective final groups. Thus, as far as an event where all the teams play in a single pool is concerned, it is named the Final Group.

If you go to the Team list then choose a country you will see its all-time Olympic record. Let it be, say, England and you wish to see its record at the European Team Championship. To do this you need to complete a few utterly simple steps:

1. Click on the Info & Photos tag.
2. Choose Men's European Chess Team Championship from the pull-down menu and click on it.
3. You are redirected to "England at the European Team Championship" scoresheet. Select Team Record (or anything else that is of interest for you).
4. You are in. Read the statistics (to learn what do the statistics concern read the table caption).

There are two ways of dealing with that. First of all, choose appropriate event summary table (see example for the Olympiads). Then move your mouse over icon and click to download. Alternatively, please move on to the event information page and find the download URL. NOTE: multi-event game files are not available. You have to load games from each event separately.

In most cases women's team are named simply China or anything else, in another case. China and Georgia (as for early 2006) are labelled twofold. This is because Chinese and Georgian women's teams played in men's event (the World Team Championship in 2005 and 1997 respectively). Women's teams' record in men's event should not be confused with that achieved in women's events. This is why they have separate labels.

OlimpBase does not attribute title to a player for life. It just shows you player's progress throughout the years, so for each event he took part in the contemporary title is shown. Player's career after retirement from OlimpBase covered events is out of our scope. For example: Akiba Rubinstein quit Olympic chess in 1931. He became a GM in 1950. OlimpBase would not recognize it, because he played no OlimpBase covered event as GM.

Names written in non-Latin alphabets were transliterated according to most standard rules with exception of names which had clearly Latin alphabet based background (like Bulgarian GM Neikirch whose name was apparently of German origin and was transliterated to its original form, not as "Neykirkh"). The vast majority of names written originally in non-Latin alphabets are in Russian and other Slavic languages written in Cyrillic (Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian). For those I have been using modified Library of Congress transliteration system which is coherent with customary transliteration rules for Eastern European names of chess players (with exception of some Ukrainian names maybe, which chess journalists tend to spell vaguely in Russianized forms).

OlimpBase is entirely encoded in utf-8 (the Unicode standard). Every name written originally in Latin-based alphabet is (or at least should be - please excuse and correct possible misspellings) written "as it is". You should be able to see all the special symbols without problems. If you see hash, please consider installing "Arial Unicode MS" font in your system. PGN game files should not include accents though. Most of accents were simply omitted. Some of them became diphthongs. See the conversion table:
ß -> ss,   ä -> ae,   ö -> oe,   ü -> ue,   ø -> oe,   å -> aa,   þ -> th,   æ --> ae.

Every newly recognized state to claim to be ancestors of another state that had disappeared before would be treated as one entity. Example: Great Britain, a team to play at the Olympiads until 1935 was counted together with England. Palestine, seen in 1935 and 1939 at the Olympiads was a Jewish national team. Its scores were added (quite controversially these days) to totals of Israeli records. Germany prior to 1945, West Germany and then united Germany (from 1990) are all counted as one team while East Germany have the separate account. In 1939 Czechoslovak team was officially referred to as "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia", having been conquered by the Nazis. Still, this was the same team with same people. Russian and Soviet records were split. Yugoslavia and Serbia & Montenegro (settled in 2003 as a loose federation of Serbia and Montenegro; incidentally those two federations were the only two republics composing Yugoslavia between 1992 and 2003) were treated as one team. Reserve, junior and combined teams received their own record sheets.

Each player has his/her own personal card where all of his/her names and teams are listed. The "major" name is the one that he/she used most recently. If you browse any event you will see all the players bearing their contemporary names.

See here for details. For official regulations on the Swiss see FIDE handbook. See Round Robin Restore front home page to learn why a lot of people do not believe that Swiss is suitable for major international team chess tournaments.

Game points are simple sum of points obtained by a team at respective boards. 1 game point counts for a game win and a half of a point counts for a draw. Final standings of team events are usually determined according to game points. The match points are alternative way of setting final positions. A team is awarded with 2 match points for every match win and 1 match point for a match draw.

Progress is quite uncommon these days but is still in use (see e.g. Blind Olympiads). It is a sum of sums of points at the end of each day.
Example: a team scored the following in a 5 round Swiss: 4-0, 3-1, 1-3, 1½-2½, 2-2.
Team's total score at the end of respective rounds will be: 4, 7, 8, 9½, 11½
Team's progress at the end of each day will be: 4, 4+7=11, 4+7+8=19, 4+7+8+9.5=28.5, 4+7+8+9.5+11.5=39   Team's final progress will be 39.0.

For details on Buchholz and Sonneborn-Berger (referred to as Berger in most cases) see FIDE handbook. There is definition of weighted Berger cited there: "Berger is the sum of the scores of the opponents teams, each multiplied by the scores achieved against this opponent team". Alternatively unweighted Berger might be of use, where only match result matters, thus ignoring the margin of a win.
Example: team A defeated team B (finished at 12½ points) by 3½-½, drew with team C (finished at 16 points) by 2-2 and lost to team D (finished at 21½ points) by 1-3.
Weighted Berger = 12.5*3.5 + 16*2 + 21.5*1 = 97.25
Unweighted Berger = 12.5*1 + 16*0.5 + 21.5*0 = 20.50
The most famous case of Berger tiebreaking happened at the 1966 Olympiad in Havana. Hungary and Yugoslavia tied on game and match points in the run for bronze. The jury controversially decided to award bronze medals to the Hungarians on a basis of unweighted Berger. Yugoslavia would have been third had only weighted Berger been used. The tournament regulations did not say a word on which variation of Berger should apply.

Not really. At the Olympiads three medals are awarded for best individual percentage results obtained at each board. But in the past it was not always the case. Sometimes only board winners received prizes (or medals). Sometimes (1939 Ol) only the championship final results were taken into account. Sometimes (1958 Ol) only one individual prize was awarded (best result at board #1). For other events the rules are not strict and depend mainly on event regulations. OlimpBase notes only board winners for minor events unless other regulations were explicitly set.

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