The question I have is why <CG>'s PGN for that tournament use the name <E Iturrizaga>?

I think the longer name should be used.

First, one point that could cause confusion is one you raise, that <CG> doesn't write its own PGN.

That's true, but for the moves (in the sense that you wrote). The names of players can be, and often are, changed by <CG> during the submission. For example, all the games for the Dubai Blitz WC come from the Dubai site - which is a FIDE site, and uses FIDE names for the players.

But <CG> will map the FIDE names to it's own names for every player. Sometimes the names are the same (except for the <last, first> format FIDE uses of course), but sometimes they aren't.

Examples from Dubai 2014 range from trivia:

<A Moussa Othman> vs <A. Moussa Othman>

<Alexey Aleksandrov> vs <Aleksej Aleksandrov>

to the conventional:

<Le Quang Liem> vs <Quang Liem Le>

<Lu Shanglei> vs <Shanglei Lu>

to the increasingly complicated:

<Mohamad Naser Al Sayed> vs <Mohammed Al-Sayed>

<Vladimir Fedoseev> vs <Vladimir3 Fedoseev>

But the basic idea is that <CG> has a formal name for each and every player, which is unique to <CG> (and thus can be mapped into FIDE's names).

* * * * *

With that long intro we come to the crux of the problem, which I may not have explained well.

The problem is that <CG> actually has two names for each and every player. It has a long name, as discussed, but it also has a short name.

The short names are not unique in some cases, or are, as I sometimes find, confusing for various reasons.

The short names are basically intended to save space for cases where the context provides clear indication of the player's actual identity.

So, <E. Iturrizaga> is the <CG> short name. While I might have a preference for a different short name, the critical issue is that the name in a PGN should never be the <CG> short name (imo).

Why not?

Well, ask <CG>. Generally, it isn't used for most players. Instead, the long form of the name is what you find when you download the PGN.

However, there seems to be some algorithm at play, where <CG> determines some long names are too long - or maybe too formal - and so decides to use the short name.

Now this may be OK for a famous player like Capablanca but for a generic player it strikes me as underspecified - and therefore problematic.

I want the PGN download to use <Eduardo Patricio Iturrizaga Bonelli>, i.e. the name at the top of the player profile - always!

In this particular case, it's perhaps true that the long name is overspecificed. Contrast it with another example: <Jose Raul Capablanca> vs <Jose Raul Capablanca y Graupera>.

But you're right that <CG> will use the name submitted in the PGN if the player doesn't exist in its database.

And so first submitters should take extra care in selecting the name.

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