Review - Garry Kasparov's MasterClass

Garry Kasprov's MasterClass was made available on YouTube recently. This is merely the preview.

  Once I had finished my review of the “Revolutionize Your Chess” Master Method course by Ginger GM Simon Williams I went to You Tube and found myself watching videos of the best fight scenes of Steven Segal and Jason Staham. You Tube (a Google company) keeps track of what I watch and on the sidebar it offers up selections of movie fight scenes, a sampling the seemingly unending number of You Tubers that make a living reviewing the Walking Dead television shows and comics (including full releases of the comics), and chess videos. Once I had finished watching some of Statham’s incredible fights from his “Transporter” series I looked on the sidebar and saw that the seven hour Garry Kasparov chess course from the MasterClass series was available and recommended for me.

  MasterClass is a series of online learning courses that is distinguished by the quality of the presenters. You can learn comedy from Steve Martin, tennis from Serena Williams, writing from James Patterson, singing from Christina Aguilera, etc… There was an acting class by Kevin Spacey that I can no longer find but that is beside the point. A MasterClass course costs $90 for a lifetime viewing pass but for the price of two courses ($180) you can watch all the courses for an entire year.

  If MasterClass was going to have a chess course there would only be two possibilities for the presenter : Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen who in their time were both considered the greatest player of all time much like Bobby Fischer was in the 1970’s when he was world champion. Since Kasparov has been retired from competitive chess since 2005 and Carlsen is an active reigning world champion, Kasparov was the likely choice. Kasparov was not only the world champion for 15 years, he is a prolific chess writer, and occasionally tries to insert himself into the world of chess politics and the politics of the world. As an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin he has found himself in exile in the West where he has a foundation that supports chess around the world.

  I knew the Kasparov Masterclass course on YouTube was pirated and it didn’t include the workbook but since YouTube recommended it to me I decided to take a look. I’d hate for anyone to think too harshly of me for viewing copyrighted material so will note that You Tube is protected from copyright claims based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as long as the copyright infringement is not intentional. This means that You Tube must take down copyright violating videos when alerted but is not breaking any laws by allowing the videos on their site and more importantly I am not breaking any laws by viewing the videos. As best I can tell the video has been taken down in the last week.

  I ended up watching the entire seven hour course in over a week. The course has incredible production values. While the GingerGM Master Method course shows 15 hours of the presenter in his best t-shirt with a white backdrop, Kasparov looks like a million bucks in a suit and is seated in front of a chessboard in a couple of spacious rooms in a mansion. Kasparov starts the course by pointing out that his goal is to inspire the students to be as passionate about chess as he is which will inspire the student to further their chess studies.

  Kasparov then goes over many different tactical elements one at a time – pins, double attacks, skewers, etc. When Kasparov sets up the pieces on the board in front of him, the screen splits and a full length board appears on the right of the screen showing a 2-D version of the board and moves. I noticed no missteps between the 2-D and 3-D boards unlike the ichess.net offerings where the visual chess board are irritatingly overlaid by ChessBase popup windows with no editing to remove them. I expect that the MasterClass was done in multiple takes much like a movie or television show and likely scripted to some extent. Each section is prefaced by a simple graphic with some music which gave the production a classy look and feel..

  Each section follows a familiar theme. Kasparov explains a simple position to illustrate the tactic and then proceeds to more complex positions which includes examples from games in his career or other famous games. Each section concludes with a composed study that is meant as a “challenge” for the student to pause and examine before Kasparov explains the solution. The tactics section takes up the first three hours of the course and then Kasparov moves on to the endgame.

  Kasparov only spends about 45 minutes on the ending and tries to demonstrate how endings require precision by showing seemingly simple endgames that contain many twists and turns. He pays special attention to the concepts of king position and the king shouldering his opposite number aside to queen a pawn. Then Kasparov moves on to the opening. This section is mostly philosophical in nature with his examples showing more of the psychological thinking behind openings and his opening choice in his must win game against Karpov in his 1987 championship match and even mentions in passing that his failure to break Krammnik’s Berlin Defence cost him his championship but that he beat the famous Berlin Wall easily after the match.

  The openings section took 45 minutes and at this point it appears the Masterclass ran out of content. The next hour has Kasparov giving a simul against three players of varying strengths – an expert, a class player, and a player that is a level above beginner. We have 45 minutes of Kasparov walking between the three boards leaning, grimacing, and thinking while his opponents try to match wits with the ex-champ. Not only does the pace of the video slow to a crawl, the boards are hard to see from the overhead and side angles (no 2D board on the side). After the simul, Kasparov goes over the games with each of the players and then gives them some lessons in the opening and ending. Having the presenter engage with the participants is a feature of the MasterClass lessons but in the case of chess it seemed artificial and a time waster. The simul and group lesson took about an hour and 45 minutes and the MasterClass concludes with Kasparov talking about his chess carreer, post retirement activities, computers, and other subjects for about an hour.

  I think that any aspiring chess player will get more instruction value from the Simon Williams’ Master Method that I looked at last week than Kasparov's MasterClass. The video did give me a better appreciation of the geometry of the chessboard that is not explained elsewhere and the value of composed studies that seemed to be a staple of the Soviet Chess School. This piece attempts both instruction and a glimpse into the mindset of a champion chess player. Unless the workbook that comes with the course is the best workbook ever the lessons come off more as an introduction to chess which to be fair was part of Kasparov’s stated goal to whet the students appetite for chess instead of hardcore instruction. Since the piece attempts both instruction and a glimpse into the mindset of a champion chess player I would have liked to see more Kasparov interviews from the past mixed in to his reminiscences. All told the excellent production values make this more of an incomplete historical view of a great chess player than an instructional video.

Master Method Review - Revolutionize Your Chess by Simon Williams

The first chapter of Simon Williams Master Method 2 is available for free on the ichess.net You Tube channel...

  With some spare time on my hands as I decompress from a year of working 50+ hour weeks and begin the search for my next job I started watching Simon Williams’s the Ginger GM) Master Method 2 : Revolutionize your Chess offering from ichess.net. If you clicked the link you may have noticed that the price of this 15 hour chess course is listed at $149 and you may think that is a little pricey. I would agree with you but will also point out that if you are on the ichess.net mailing list you will not only receive free samples of the ichess.net offerings (in addition to the course samples on their YouTube page), you will also receive massive discounts on all their offerings if you exhibit a moderate amount of patience. I purchased the Ginger GM Method at a 70% discount in November which meant that the ‘$149’ course only cost me $43.50 which works out to be less than $3 an hour which is just a little more than renting a DVD from the nearby Family Video in Marshalltown, Iowa.

  Simon Williams is an English grandmaster with a popular You Tube channel and is known for his hyper aggressive style. I had watched his first Master Method course (purchased for 50% off in July) which was billed as containing ‘Chess Improvement Secrets for the Busy Player). The course was 16 hours and gave an hour on each subject that Williams deemed important to get a player up to speed quickly – openings that can be played for both white and black, the main endings a player should know by heart, defensive play, attacking play, etc.. The production values were similar to most of ichess.net lessons – the left side of the screen is taken up by the board and the right hand side of the screen is mostly a backdrop with a small inset of the instructor on video giving the lesson. The ‘Master Method’ lessons are generally prefaced by a few minutes of the instructor in some exotic locale like the view from a high rise office building, a garden, and in Williams’ case in front of some amazing architecture in Barcelona. Williams’ master method course was entertaining enough but with few exceptions boiled down to the boilerplate ichess.net lessons which are loosely themed topics explained by the presenter going over Grandmaster games. The main takeaway I got from Williams Master Method was that even the Secrets for a busy player take a lot of effort in order to get real improvement.

  In Williams second course the introduction takes place in the setting of an exotic rock garden but the location is not used to preface the rest of the lessons which has Williams in his ‘GingerGM’ t-shirt going over his material (although the last three lessons are prefaced with Williams in a dress shirt sitting at a desk. This course is subtitled ‘Revolutionize Your Chess’ and Williams is serious about this subject. He gives a tight opening repertoire that aims for isolated pawn positions with White and the French and English (e6 and d6) as Black. Williams then gives hours of examples of typical attacking plans with the isolated queen pawn and black positions but instead of going through entire games he breezes through the openings and doesn’t show the end of the game if the attack leads to a material or overwhelming positional advantage. This allows him to go through more examples than the 3 to 4 games typical to ichess.net lessons.

  The rest of the Ginger GM Master method 2 goes into getting into an attacking mindset. There are chapters on being aware to attacking possibilities, not attacking prematurely, and the nuts and bolts of attacking and calculating variations. The chapters on attacking are very practical and as tight as the opening repertoire and middle game plan section. The examples were clearly thought out to build on each other. One attacking example leads to another similar but slightly different pattern that allows Williams to challenge the view to determine whether the same attacking idea will work or not. All chess courses end up having some contradictory advices and this course is no exception. After spending four hours recommending an opening repertoire based on getting an isolated queens pawn and how to use the isolated pawn to generate an attack there a more than a few examples in the attacking and calculating section where Williams breezily claims one side is better because the opponent has an isolated queens pawn or some of the same positional defects that the isolated pawn brings like more pawn islands. It just goes to show that it in chess it all depends and I suppose by learning to play with the isolated queen pawn one will certainly learn the shortcomings of the setup whjich will come in handy when facing the isolated pawn.

  I think this course explains a philosophy of attack better than any of ichess.net’s other offerings. The material is well thought out and not sugar-coated in any way. Williams continually says the course is meant to be viewed more than once and insists that the viewer will reap better results from practicing his principles of attack in long time limit games. He asks the view to pause the lessons to determine a plan or calculate a line on multiple occasions and repeatedly points out that his course is only the signposts and the road to chess improvement is paved with hard work.

  The only quibble I have is that while the content was obviously carefully thought out the presentation seems to have been rushed to get to market. The videos are full of annoying interruptions of Chessbase popups or blank screens that could have been edited out or done in another take. The inset of Williams talking seems pixelated and blurry and there is even a part in the final chapter where Williams’ pet cat makes an appearance. Williams takes great pains to be seriously professional in the course and forgoes most of the ‘entertainment’ (singing, cursing, shouting, etc…) that is a staple of his YouTube channel but the presentation has a certain sloppiness that doesn’t match the sterling content. Again this is only a quibble and I think that Williams’ ‘Revolutionize Your Chess’ Master Method delivers a product that made it a bargain at $43 and probably worth the full price of $150 for the devoted student.

DGT960 Chess Clock Review

Thanks to it's folding nature, the DGT960 chess clock takes up a fifth of the storage space of the old reliable Excalibur Game Time II

  When I started my youth chess tournaments in West Des Moines in late 2010 I had enough chess sets for a hundred players but only a half dozen clocks in various states of repair and disrepair. Hardly any players brought their own clocks and I would hold off on using my few clocks until I could identify the slowest moving games in each round at which point I would give these slow moving games a clock with at least 10 minutes per side.

  This was my way of keeping the tournament moving but not especially satisfactory. I bought a few more clocks here and there and in the fall of 2010 bought 12 Excalibur Game Time II clocks from American Chess Equipment. I kept these clocks in as good condition as I could by only using them for tournaments and storing them in their boxes when not in use. I chose the Excalibur clock because they were inexpensive, easy to set and use, and seemed quite durable judging from how many players I knew that owned them for many years. In the succeeding tournaments I was able to have a clock on almost every board from the beginning of each round which made the tournaments a lot classier and made my job as a tournament director easier since I didn’t have to think about which boards were going to need a clock.

  Last fall I was ready to get some new clocks so I went online looking to get more of the Excalibur Game Time II clocks but found out that the Excalibur clocks were not available. I have found some snippets of the company declaring bankruptcy in 2009 but nothing definitive except that ‘Yelp’ reports the company headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida as closed.

  With no Game Time II clocks available I was on the lookout for a different brand of clock. I wanted clocks that were durable, easy to set, and allowed for a delay. Eventually I settled on the DGT960 folding chess clock from digitalgametechnology.com. The clocks had the features I needed, were relatively inexpensive, and could be folded into a box which I assumed would help their durability.

  I ordered 10 of the DGT clocks earlier this year and finally used them in my April youth tournament. The 10 clocks took less room in my car than two Excalibur clocks. I was able to set the clocks from the instruction guide easy enough using the middle button of the clock to get into ‘clock set’ mode and the surrounding directional ring button to set the time, delay, and type of delay. Even though the DGT960 clock is a fifth of the mass of the Game Time II, when unfolded it take up a little more surface space.

When opened for use the DGT960 takes up slightly more real estate than the Game Time II but not nearly as much height which makes it perfect for long narrow caves...

  The clocks worked just fine for the tournament. The kids liked the black and red colors and I heard no complaints. As a tournament director I had a couple of quibbles. There was no move counter on the clock which meant that if the game was in a state where one player was checking the other over and over because they couldn’t execute a checkmate I had to hang around the game and count moves instead of relying on the Game Time II’s built in move counter. My other quibble was that the angle of the DGT960 made it difficult for me to see the board and the clock at the same time. These were minor issues and like I said the clocks were fine for using at my youth tournaments.

  When I headed up to Okoboji this year I put a few of the DGT960 clocks and some Game Time II clocks into my box of tournament directing stuff because there are always those few people that don’t have clocks so having some loaner clocks is a useful extra although I don’t think I’d lend anyone my clock at a tournament in New Jersey. As it happened I did need to loan someone a clock during the first round before the blitz tournament. Without thinking I pulled out a Game Time II from by box. This got me thinking about the features most players’ clocks possess and where the DGT960 stacked up.

  One area the DGT960 falls well short of most other clocks is the lack of a way for the player to see if it is their move from across the tournament room. The Game Time II has a white stripe under the button you press after your move and when it is your move the stripe can be seen from a long distance. I only stay away from my board during a tournament for two reasons. One reason is when I’m so disgusted with my play that I can’t stand looking at my position. The other reason is when my opponent drifts into some sort of trance like state and uses gobs of time. When that happens I try to get away from the board so as to not disturb my opponents reverie. If I was using the DGT960 I’d have to get close to the table to see if it was finally my move and risk reminding my opponent that he was in fact playing a timed game. Most clocks have a LED light or lever that can be seen at a distance but not the DGT960.

  A feature the DGT960 has that I haven’t seen before on other clocks is the source of the ‘960’ in the clock’s name. Chess 960 (aka Fisher random chess) allows the rearrangement of the back row of pieces in one of 960 different combinations). The DGT 960 uses the bottom row of its display to pick a random or selected 960 position, showing a bare bones LED display of the 8 pieces arranged on the back row as well as the ‘960’ numbered designation for the starting position. This is all nice but the display is distracting if you aren’t playing Chess 960. Luckily the display is turned off with a press of the 960 button on the clock’s control panel but when the clock is turned off and on (the preferred way of resetting the clock after the game), the ‘960’ piece display is back on the bottom row! The clock will remember the last clock settings and reset it for a new game but it won’t remember the setting of the 960 piece display’s visibility.

  The DGT960 seems to be perfect for the purpose I purchased it for - an inexpensive clock for my youth chess tournaments that doesn't take up a lot of room in my car. The only aspect I can't answer to is the clock's durability which will take a couple of years at least to determine. As a clock for personal use it falls far short of what I'd want in a chess clock with the exception of being small enough to fit in my pocket. Except for the Chess 960 starting position features that I don’t use I was having a lot of trouble finding an area where the DGT960 would be superior to the Game Time II or any other chess clock until I accidentally pressed the on/off button and the clock reset. The on-off button is located conveniently on the front of the clock right next to the button you press to end your move and start the opponent’s clock. It may seem like a detriment to have the clock reset during the game but what if you are in tough spot with seconds on your clock? Wouldn’t it be a shame if the clock accidentally reset…

This action-packed video shows how easy it is to open the DGT960 chess clock with one hand, how easy it is to accidentally reset the clock, and how the chess 960 starting position icons reappear after turning the clock off and on. Please send any 'hand modelling' inquiries via private email.

Special Effects with a Poverty of Content

  The Millionaire Chess Open was held in Las Vegas last weekend. When it was announced last year I wrote how I thought organizers Grandmaster Maurice Ashley and financier Amy Lee were approaching the tournament in a business-like manner by reserving the right to cancel the tournament unless they received 1,500 entries (at $1,000 per entry) for the 1 million dollar guaranteed prize fund by March 31st. At the deadline less than 100 entries were received but Ashley and Lee decided to go ahead with their vision of a high-entry, high prize fund chess tournament. At the time Ashley said he hoped to capitalize on “the incredible explosion of scholastic chess as well as the massive increase in the number of online players” to generate the enthusiasm and entries for the tournament.

  I predicted last year that the tournament was going to be successful but when the tournament started last Thursday there were less than 600 entries which to me was a very low number. I see so many young players whose parents will take them halfway across the country for national youth tournaments and so many adults that will travel to national tournaments like the World Open, US Open, Chicago Open, and National Open that I could not imagine a couple of thousand class players not putting up the $1,000 for a chance to win a $40,000 top class prize. While the high entry fees possibly scared lower rated players off and higher rated players aren’t used to paying any entry fees much less a $1,000, I believe a contributing factor to the low turnout may have been that having the tournament on National Chess Day (October 11th) meant the people who would normally travel to Las Vegas and take part in this first of a kind event were otherwise occupied by organizing and supporting their local National Chess Day events. If the scholastic players and parents that Ashley wanted to attract stayed away because of Las Vegas’ reputation (the tournament felt compelled to bill itself as 'Child Friendly') or local National Chess Day activities, online players mainly play chess online and rarely if ever play chess away from their computer screens – after all that’s why they’re online players.

  As it became clear that the attendance wasn’t going to meet projections, the tenor of Ashley and Lee’s comments changed to talking about Millionaire Chess being a business that is on a three to five year plan. I believe they didn’t talk about that before because it makes no sense to pitch a once in a lifetime tournament and future tournaments at the same time. The pair is talking about having similar tournaments in other cities and if there is one in driving distance I wouldn’t mind taking a shot at some big money (the top prize for my section at the Millionaire Open was $40,000). $1,000 is a lot to pay for a chess tournament but maybe the price could be lowered if some of the amenities (gift bags, floor shows, meals, passes to the lounge, etc…) were dispensed with.

  The Millionaire Open promised a unique Internet experience and the visual element was world class. The web page that displayed the games was very impressive. It included pictures of the players, a live computer evaluation, how much time each player had left, and how much time was being spent on the current move. In addition there is a feed of the live broadcast and a live chat board. At the bottom of the screen I could view 8 games at once or look at a graph of the computer evaluation of each move in the position. Visually it was very impressive but in my opinion there were many things missing. Only the top 13 boards of the open section were available for viewing. I’ve been watching International Master (and Okoboji Open champion) John Bartholomew’s instructional videos on YouTube and was hoping to follow his play at Millionaire Chess the same way I did at the Reykjavik Open last year but out of the first seven rounds I could only follow his games the three times he was on the top boards. The boards never seemed to have the clocks set right so it was impossible to tell which player was in time trouble and sometimes the entire page just seemed to get stuck and needed to be refreshed.

  The live game web page says ‘powered by chess24’ which means I may be off base in assigning praise or criticism to the Millionaire Open team and should instead be looking at the contractors, chess24.com. Whoever was responsible, the live game feed had a lot of bells and whistles that were attractive but was short on accuracy in regards to the clock times and content with so few games available for viewing. During the semi-finals and finals on Monday the live game page was disabled and there was no way to look in on any of the games in the final two rounds of the Open section where players were battling for IM and GM norms or even the semifinal and final round games.

  In addition to the live game feed, the tournament had a commentated broadcast for every round. The broadcast was slickly produced with a professional studio set featuring hosts Women’s International Master Arianne Caoili and Grandmaster Robert Hess. They were joined by International Master Laurence Trent who was armed with a video screen complete with computer evaluations of the game. The broadcasts were around three hours long and didn’t start until two hours into the round.

  I watched the Saturday and Sunday shows. There were plenty of breaks in the action but there were ‘competitor profiles’ to look at and puzzles to solve which was a welcome break from the commercials and Muzak filled blank screens that other tournaments show during breaks. The commentators seemed exclusively focused on the top boards even though there were nearly 3 dozen grandmasters competing. I was wondering why until a crowd gathered during a time scramble on board 10. A cameraman was there but the commentators could only guess what was happening because they couldn’t get a good view of the board.

  I was very impressed with Robert Hess as a commentator. He didn’t rely on computer analysis but gave his impressions of the player’s mindsets and how they would approach the next phase of the game. Trent’s role seemed to be to consult the computer to show when a player had or missed a tactical opportunity while Caoili seemed to be asking Trent and Hess questions that a beginner might (“Maybe he’s upset because he didn’t win with the White pieces?”) even though she is a very strong player who occasionally would throw out variations that Trent and Hess didn’t grasp but were proved correct by Trent’s computer.

A sample of the Millionaire Chess live broadcast...

  Hess was very professional in his non-chess comments but Trent and Caoili seemed very bent on ‘entertaining’ and there were parts of the broadcast where I thought I was listening to some shock jock. I heard that tripled pawns was an ‘Irish pawn center’ and that Wesley So was not a typical Filipino player because he didn’t play tactically even though Filipino players do nothing but play blitz all the time and that the Chinese players were also blitz addicts which made them particularly dangerous in time trouble. There was one game described as having blunders than a George W. Bush speech and a position that was messier than a Sarah Palin press conference. I wasn’t offended but I was vaguely uncomfortable listening to these sort of generalizations and put downs. I mentioned this to one of my co-workers and he immediately asked if the commentators were from America. When I said no (Trent is British and Caoili from Australia) he said he wasn’t surprised because this kind of talk is normal for the sports shows he watches from other countries and that Americans were pretty thin-skinned. I wish more time was spent going over the chess games on the lower boards than the commentators trying to amuse me. The tournament climaxed with the ‘Millionaire Monday’ where the top four players from each section were on the big stage battling for $100,000 in the open section and $40,000 in the lower sections (no one was actually going to become a millionaire) and the broadcast was fast paced because the games had a quicker time limit and there wasn’t time for the silly banter of the previous days.

  Everyone that participated in the tournament has written about it in glowing terms and most of the people that were watching the games or broadcast online had many of the same comments that I did about the lack of coverage of the GM games on lower boards and the uneven commentary. The online experience was far less than the groundbreaking experience advertised. An old boss of mine had a phrase that described it perfectly: “Lots of sizzle - not a lot of steak”. Great looking graphics and web pages were combined with a minimum of content. Aside from the lack of live games to view, the game files of the tournament are incomplete (only including the top boards of the first six rounds) and two days after the end of the tournament there is no comprehensive prize list on the website or even final standings. I began this post looking for reasons why this tournament didn’t attract as many players as expected and I did come up with some reasons but then I started writing about the gaps in the online coverage and lack of post-event content. I’ve never seen an organization where the habit of not taking care of details and following up after the end of a project was limited to one section or department and I wonder now if Millionaire Chess' participation goal was undone by the same inattention to detail.

Chess DVDs - ‘Play Like Tal’ and ‘Grandmaster Secrets : Topalov’

Daisy kept guard over the DVD's I bought in April until I was ready to review them.

  In June, I reviewed some of the chess DVD’s I bought from www.onlinechesslessons.net on an impulse. Along with the review I wrote about how I joined their affiliate program, ran their ads on my websites, and never received the commissions I was due to receive as per their affiliate agreement. I stopped running www.onlinechesslessons.net ads in July and signed up to be an affiliate for Amazon.com. Since Amazon has already paid me a commission I'd have to say they have proven to be a reliable partner so if you are an Amazon.com customer and enjoy my blog you can help me out by clicking one of their ads on this site before you make your purchase.

  Since my two favorite summer TV shows, 'Falling Skies' and 'The Last Ship' recently ended their seasons and 'The Walking Dead' isn't starting their new season until October 12th, I had some spare viewing time on my hands took a look at two more of the chess DVDs I purchased earlier this year – ‘Play Like Tal’ by Grandmaster Simon Williams and ‘Grandmaster Secrets : Veselin Topalov’ by Grandmaster Damian Lemos.

A sample of 'Play Like Tal' courtesy of YouTube.

A great book!

  Mikhail Tal was the World Champion from 1960 to 1961 and a revolutionary figure in chess history. In the 1930’s the United States was considered the preeminent chess power in the world having won the chess Olympiads in 1931, 1933, 1935, and 1937. When international chess play resumed after World War II, it became apparent that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in chess and it wasn't even a close contest. The USSR trounced the United States in a 1945 ten player radio match by the score of 15.5 to 4.5 with the Americans losing 7 of the individual two game matches with one win and two ties. Mikhail Botvinnik became the first Soviet to be World Chess Champion in 1948 and the title remained in Soviet hands for the next 55 years (except for 1972-1975 when the American Bobby Fischer held the crown). Botvinnik was a national hero and considered the herald of ‘Soviet School of Chess’ which relied on physical conditioning, intense opening preparation, training matches, published analysis and annotations of games – basically a highly professional approach to chess. Because the personalities of the Soviet players were hidden by the ‘Iron Curtain’, they were thought of as robotic automatons by the western world.

  That changed when 20 year old Mikhail Tal from Riga (in Latvia) won the USSR championship in 1957. Tal’s style set him apart from the Soviet machine. He would sacrifice material for the attack and win games when his opponents would falter in their defense. Tal’s attacks would frequently prove to be unsound when picked apart in published analysis months later but that didn’t matter to him as long as he won over the board. Because of his ‘incorrect’ play, Tal was labeled as lucky and accused of hypnotizing his opponents but no one was able to stop him as he was again USSR champion in 1958, won the Interzonal tournament the same year, the Candidates tournament in 1959, and then wrested the World Championship from Botvinnik in 1960. Botvinnik won the rematch in 1961 but by holding the championship for just that one year Tal’s legacy was cemented for generations of chess players to the point that 50 years later DVDs are made about his games instead of other legendary attackers that never won the world championship.

  In the DVD, Williams takes 15 minutes to talk about Tal and another 30 minutes going over one of Tal’s 1960 games against Botvinnik. Williams then proceeds to the meat of the DVD – seven of Tal’s games produced in an interactive style. In the interactive games Williams goes over the games much like the Botvinnik game except at five to seven points the viewer is presented a choice of three moves to pick from a menu. If move Tal played is selected the DVD continues with congratulatory words from Williams and if a different move is selected Williams explains why Tal didn’t play the selected move (sometimes the chosen move was the best but just not played by Tal) and lets the viewer choose again. As a bonus there are five positions at the end of the DVD that challenge the view via the same interactive style as the critical positions in the games.

  The DVD is produced by Williams’ GingerGM company and has excellent production values. Williams takes up the right half of the screen with a chessboard in front of him while the left side of the screen has the digital chessboard with the typical arrows and highlighted squares. The entire screen is crisp and clear. Williams constantly refers to a laptop that is mostly hidden behind the digital board but does manage to make eye contact with the viewer and has a breezy conversational style. While going over the games, Williams makes the moves on the physical chessboard in front of him. The chessboard is at an angle where the viewers can see very little of it. I think the board is present for Williams' comfort level even though he has a laptop less than a yard away. The selected games are all attacking games but the interactive positions don't have obvious continuations and the viewer is forced to stop and think. I found the positions challenging and when I didn’t come up with the Tal move, Williams’ explanation were useful in helping me understand where I was going wrong.

  At seven hours of running time (not counting the time spent to calculate the moves), the 2 DVD set is a good value for $18 dollars retail price and an excellent one for the $9 I paid during a 50% off promotion. I would recommend getting the physical disk. I couldn’t figure out a way to get the player to switch to the next segment of the DVD after a game section ended when using the download, but when I put the DVD in my computer or in the player hooked up to my TV it was smooth sailing.

  The only thing I didn’t enjoy about the DVD was Williams harping on Tal’s drinking (saying he would have played with a bottle of whiskey at the table if he could have) and smoking and claiming it led to his early death. Williams mentions how Tal was addicted to morphine but failed to mention his addiction came about after an operation. Tal always seemed to be photographed with a cigarette hanging from his lips but he had a series of kidney ailments in his 20s and I can’t imagine his drinking led to that and maybe the expectation of a lifetime of health problems and/or living under the thumb of the Soviet system led to his drinking. Tal lived to be 55 which was as long or longer as World Champions Tigran Petrosian (55), Alexander Alekhine (53), and Jose Capablanca (53). While Alekhine was a heavy drinker there were no indications that the other two led the kind of lifestyle that would have led to an early death like Tal’s. I’m not saying Tal should be treated and feted as if he was Derek Jeter but I wish Williams had characterized him more as a generational chess player and less as some idiot savant (at various times Williams refers to Tal as a lunatic, nutter, bonkers, crazy...) that became world champion despite his drinking and smoking.

A sample of GM Damian Lemos going over a game from his Topalov DVD courtesy of YouTube.

  The second DVD I watched was ‘Grandmaster Secrets – Play like Veselin Topalov’. In this 2.5 hour DVD, GM Damian Lemos serves as a guide through five games by Topalov. Topalov has been a top 10 player since 1995 and won the FIDE world championship in 2005 by winning an 8 player unification tournament. In 2006 he lost his FIDE title to Vladimir Kramnik in his first title defense and failed to retake his crown in a match with Anand in 2010. I have a hard time putting Topalov on the list of World chess champions since he never won a match for the championship but many people have him on their champions list and there is no question he was universally regarded as the best player in the world in the mid 2000’s.

  All five games have Topalov building up an attack on the enemy king and eventually crashing through to victory against top level competition. Lemos isn’t as engaging as Williams but he is just as thorough in going over the games. Lemos spends a lot of time going over the opening in detail and gives extra emphasis in which side will get the ‘bishop pair’. Lemos also does a good job going over the variations in Tolalov’s attacks. He goes a little overboard on the circles, arrows, and highlighted squares but in general he does a very good job explaining the games. I only have two complaints on his presentation. Lemos doesn’t seem to know how to use the Chessbase interface in his videos. Whenever he goes into a side variation a window pops up on a piece of the demonstration board and he has to click a button to get rid of it. I found this distracting but not nearly as distracting as Lemos’ penchant for saying ‘You Know’ at every opportunity in two of the five games. Check out the free sample from the DVD that I link to above and count how many times Lemos says ‘You Know’. I lost count after 75 which averaged out to once every 20 seconds…

  This DVD is an in-house production of Online Chess Lessons and like most chess videos has the digital chessboard on the left side of the screen and the presenter on the right. Most of the Online Chess Lessons videos have the presenter in the middle of the right hand side of the screen framed by the company’s logo above and beneath and this DVD is no exception. In the ‘Play Like Tal’ video, Williams is in perfect focus, is speaking to the viewer and not a microphone, and has the same outfit and same background in the entire seven hour presentation. Lemos is out of focus, speaks into a headset, is wearing different clothes and is in front of a different background for each game (once using a makeshift backdrop consisting of a sheet). In four of the games the digital board was the kind used in Chessbase and in one of the games a Internet Chess Club board is used. Normally the presentation wouldn’t make a lot of difference to me but it gave the entire video an unprofessional feel as if it was something hurriedly put together in a series of hotel rooms. When combined with the distracting presentation $20 dollars for the download of $25 for the physical DVD is not good value for the cash.

  While I enjoyed both DVDs (even if I'll never play like Tal or Topalov), GingerGM’s ‘Play Like Tal’ far outstripped Online Chess Lessons ‘Grandmaster Secrets : Topalov’ both in content and presentation. If you get on the Online Chess Lessons mailing list they will give you free downloads and large discounts pretty frequently. I like free stuff but the problem with paying cash for chess DVDs is there is so much quality free content on the internet it hardly seems worth it. On YouTube Daniel Kings's Power Play and kingscrusher channels review the top grandmaster games, while International Masters Christof Sielecki (Chessexplained) and John Bartholomew primarily go over their own games. Those four You Tube channels are just a small sampling of chess videos available for free to the viewing public. I bought this batch of Chess DVD's in April on pure impulse but I can't see myself paying for Chess DVD's again unless it were for a targeted need like learning about an opening.

Chess DVD's - Something Old and Something New

Some of the Chess DVD's I recently
bought from onlinechesslessons.net.

  I recently purchased a large amount of DVDs from onlinechesslessons.net, whose ads you may have noticed on this blog over the past few months. I signed up to be an affiliate, put a link to their site on mine and according to the affiliate agreement I was sent (and I quote) “You’ll then get affiliate commissions for any sale made from that link and future sales from that computer for up to 90 days.” I tested the affiliate commission calculations last November by logging in under an account separate from my affiliate account and making a purchase. Sure enough, the affiliate account was credited with a commission but I never received a check. I never really gave it much thought and chalked it up to experience. You can see samples of the company’s offerings on their YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/OnlineChessLessons and if you get on their mailing list they will offer free DVD’s and other special offers from time to time.

  In April, the site offered a 50% discount on any order of $150 or more. I had recently come into some unexpected cash helping some old retail store customers and decided to place an order. I ordered three DVD’s by Simon Williams (the English GM whose games I followed years ago when I started playing the Dutch Defence) and a full set of DVDs of former World Champion Anatoly Karpov discussing his best games, games by Bobby Fischer, and his matches against Kasparov and Gata Kamsky. Those two purchases got me very close to the $150 threshold so as an afterthought I ordered 2 DVD’s by GM Damian Lemos going over games by top grandmasters and a DVD called ‘Fighting in the Endgame’ by FIDE Master Alisa Melekhina. All the selections come with the option of downloading the content or downloading the content and having the physical DVD’s mailed to you. The difference in price between the DVD’s and the download was only a few dollars for all but the Karpov collection so I ordered all the DVD’s except the Karpov Collection in addition to the downloads and I received every DVD I ordered before a week had passed.

  Now don’t get me wrong – I have no delusions or illusions that watching a bunch of chess DVD’s is going to make me any better of a chess player. This was an impulse buy for entertainment purposes to help me get over the reduction in reruns of Law & Order, Law & Order : Criminal Intent, and Law & Order : Special Victims Unit on my favorite television stations but if I suddenly become a super strong chess player you’ll know what the secret was.

  The first DVD I watched was Alisa Melekhina’s ‘Fighting in the Endgame’ (you can see the first part of the video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsplMAyHkCg). I started with this one because at one hour it had the shortest running time. The endgame is my favorite part of chess – I’ve been looking at some of the favorite games I’ve played for a future post and almost every one of them has the fight going deep into the endgame. The endgame is an infrequent subject in chess DVD’s and videos with most focusing on opening preparation, attacking play, or games collections of great players. Melekhina is a frequent participant in the US Women’s championship and a master level player. The DVD has the production values of most recent chess videos - flashy graphics in the opening sequence, a computer chess board taking up half the screen with different colored arrows and squares to highlight key concepts and the presenter taking up half of the other half of the screen. The remaining quarter of the screen varies from company to company. Chessbase videos use it to show the move list, other companies show a computer evaluation or the time remaining, and the onlinechesslessons.net videos use the space for their logo.

  ‘Fighting in the Endgame’ has two parts with each part showing a game of Melekhina’s – in part one she fights for a draw from a poor position against an equal player and in part two she demonstrates a game in which she presses for a win against a lower rated player who seems happy to get a draw. In each game Melekhina attempts to impress four themes: adapt to a change in the position, prevent your opponent from executing their plan, take advantage of complacency, and force your opponent to make decisions. Melekhina’s sample games illustrate her themes but if I hadn’t known they were her games I wouldn’t have guessed from the presentation since she seemed to be reading the entire time. Even though Melekhina is always on screen she hardly looks in the camera although that may be because the camera was out of focus with a fuzzy looking picture. Looking at many onlinechesslessons.net video samples on YouTube, I’ve noticed the common theme of the presenter rarely looking in the camera, seeming to be reading off a script, and the video pane of the presenter looking out of focus. Compare the free part one of ‘Fighting in The Endgame’ with this Game of the Day video by Daniel King of Chessbase at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS8FIU6k7iM – King is in focus, is looking at the camera, and is engaged with the audience even though he had less than 24 hours to prepare this 15 minute video.

  While the two games in ‘Fighting in the Endgame’ were interesting, in my opinion the detachment and seeming lack of enthusiasm of the presenter detracted a lot from the presentation. There are just two games on the DVD and the lack of content is offset by the low price (the download is $10 and I got the DVD and download for half off the $15 retail price). Given that half of the DVD is available for free on YouTube I was only getting a half hour of unavailable material which I hardly consider good value for my money even at half price. In fact, if I had been a savvy shopper and found the sample on YouTube I wouldn't have made this purchase in the first place.

  After finishing ‘Fighting in the Endgame’ I turned my attention to the Karpov Collection. There are plenty of samples on YouTube at www.youtube.com/results?search_query=henley+karpov. These videos are remastered versions of what looks like TV shows from the late 1990’s hosted by GM Ron Henley, who was one of Karpov’s seconds in the 1990’s. Anatoly Karpov was seen by many chess fans as the chess embodiment of the ‘evil empire’ communist cold war USSR. He became the World Championship Challenger in 1974 by defeating Victor Korchnoi in a match where Korchnoi’s seconds were ‘assigned’ to other duties away from the host city of Moscow before the match and Karpov then became champion when Fischer refused to defend his title unless his conditions for the match were met (an unlimited match with the first to 10 wins taking the match but the champion couldn’t lose his title in the case of a 10-9 match loss). When Korchnoi defected from the USSR and became the championship challenger in 1978 and 1981, Karpov was accused of receiving signals from his trainers via his yogurt snack and the USSR was accused of using parapsychologists and putting Korchnoi’s wife and son in prison in order to pressure Korchnoi. In 1984, Karpov’s match with Garry Kasparov was aborted after 48 games when Karpov looked to be in danger of a historic collapse when he lost 2 games in a row to cut his lead to 5-3 in the race to six wins match and Karpov was widely accused of using his influence to have the match aborted.In Dominic Lawson’s book ‘The Inner Game’, he describes the 1992 quarter final candidates match between Nigel Short and Karpov in detail and paints Karpov as a sneering victor and the sorest of sore losers whose team has a parapsychologist that constantly stares at Short and bugs his room to listen in on his analysis with his seconds.

  Whether Karpov is seen as a worthy world champion or the beneficiary of the USSR’s communist system demanding he be kept at the top of the chess world by any means necessary he was undoubtedly one of the top players in the world for a quarter century, holding one of the top two places on the FIDE rating lists from 1973 to 1991 and in the top three for six years after that (www.olimpbase.org/Elo/player/Karpov,%20Anatoly.html) and to watch a player of that caliber go over his games is a rare treat.

  The production values of the Karpov DVDs are as low-tech as the ‘Fighting in the Endgame’ are high-tech. Instead of an electronic board, Henley and Karpov move the pieces on a plastic demonstration board with a pocket for each square. This means that after going over a variation the presenters must manually set up the position instead of instantaneously reverting to the game with a mouse click. There are many times in the videos where Henley resets the board and Karpov corrects him. Sometimes the White pieces are beige and sometimes red and sometimes red with a large white dot on each piece. There is no split screen of the board and the presenter - when Karpov and Henley are shown the board is not visible and vice versa. Most of the time the camera is on the presenters when they are talking in generalities but I found the few times Karpov would rattle off a variation while on camera quite hard to follow.

  Having two presenters interact with each other made the games more interesting and a lot less like a lecture from a disembodied out of focus talking head. Henley is deferential to Karpov but hardly subservient. He offers suggestions, most of which Karpov shoots down with a tactical variation but sometimes giving the world champion pause as he mutters “What to do…?” before offering his opinion on Henley’s suggestion. As I mentioned before, in his heyday Karpov was described as kind of a jerk and in these videos he had no problem making some comments about other players and chess personalities that could be taken as snide. He talks about how Spassky did no preparation for his match with Fischer in 1972 and that Kasparov was too inexperienced to defeat him in their first match but learned how to be a champion from Karpov. At one point when Henley mentions a spot during the 1996 Karpov-Gata Kamsky match where Kamsky’s father (you can read about the infamous chess parent Rustam Kamsky here) seemed ready to explode, Karpov says with a chuckle that even a not-so-good player like Rustam Kamsky knew Gata was busted.

  Karpov goes over Fisher’s games for almost 4 hours on the DVD collection and while he discusses the games competently enough I've seen them explained so many times by so many people that the world champion didn't have much to add. In contrast, the nine hours Karpov spends going over his own games are amazing. Since these are his games he is intimately and infinitely knowledgeable about them and easily rattles off variations to explain why he made a particular move or why the king belongs on f2 instead of g2. Karpov has a reputation as a defensive player but he shows amazing tactical acumen, oftentimes refuting Henley’s suggestions with an offhand variation. One thing I noted was Karpov’s obsession with tempo when discussing his games. He often goes to great lengths to show how a certain sequence of moves get him to his desired setup one move ahead of other sequences and later in the game shows how being that extra move ahead decided the game in his favor.

  There is another DVD set in the Karpov Collection called ‘Karpov’s Russian School of Chess’. I only watched the first 10 minutes of Karpov on Openings in which he discusses the most basic beginner principles for openings at which point I zoned out. While the Karpov Collection set of DVD’s is dated in terms of production values, 13+ hours of chess discussed by a World Champion including 9+ hours of his own games is an outstanding value for the $65 price tag for the download ($119 for the DVD and download is a bit much) and at the 50% off price I paid was one of the best bargains ever even if the next penny I receive from onlinechesslessons.net in the form of an affiliate commission will be the first. I hope to review my other purchases in a future post but watching them will have to wait until I watch the Karpov Collection again.

  As a postscript, a month after I placed the order I received an email from onlinechesslessons.net letting me know I had a commission coming and asking what websites I was using to link to their site. I let them know and then asked when I could expect my commission. I received no answer so I pressed the matter a week later whereupon I received an email from the president of the company letting me know I wouldn't be receiving any commissions because (and I quote) "people don't get commissions on their own sales". As my departed mother would say "How convenient..."

When is any sale not any sale? When it is your sale, of course!
Maybe I can get commissions from someone else's sales...