As part of a huge update fixing many typos and other small inconsistencies with the dataset, I went through David Williams’s twitter feed. Big-name players who tweet about their tournaments are invaluable. Keep it up, guys.

As part of this update I investigated: (a) every pair of names that were off by one character, (b) every person who played in two GPs that occured simultaneously, and (c) every entry that had a parenthetical nickname. This unearthed hundreds of pairs that I felt sure enough to combine, and some that needed to be split. As with any combining effort, there’s going to be some false positives (entries that should not have been merged that were) and false negatives (names I should have merged but elected not to). Many of the false positives probably came from how I aggressively merged all “Yusuke” and “Ryusuke”-s into a corresponding “Yuusuke” and “Ryuusuke”. But I think overall I improved the quality of the database by a sizeable margin. The update removed 486 duplicate entries.