Claymation

I just came across the following clip, which is definitely worth watching. I'm not sure how long it took to create, but hats off to those that did.

The actual moves were:
Roesche - Schlage 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. Qe2 b5 6. Bb3 Be7 7. c3 O-O 8. O-O d5 9. exd5 Nxd5 10. Nxe5 Nf4 11. Qe4 Nxe5 12. Qxa8 Qd3 13. Bd1 Bh3 14. Qxa6 Bxg2 15. Re1 Qf3 16. Bxf3 Nxf3#

Carlsen hustles the hustlers

Taking a leaf from Maurice Ashley's late night chess adventures, Magnus Carlsen decided to have a try at playing some New York chess hustlers. The outcome wasn't really a surprise, with Carlsen handing out some Norwegian chess justice. He played a few games for the crowd (which included actress Liv Tyler) although it turns out some of his opponents had no idea who he was.
Gizmodo has a nice story about the whole activity, including video of the goings on. If you watch the clip, make sure you stay until the end, where a black squirrel almost steals the show.

Park hustling

I remember an article I read a number of years ago, where Yasser Seirawan used to describe how he would hustle the hustlers who played chess for money in New York. While he was stronger than his opponents, he wouldn't try and win too easily, instead finding a way to win by a tempo, or with a lucky check that led to mate.
Well GM Maurice Ashley did the same thing the other day, but this time it was caught on film. At first his opponent is very talkative, but as the game terms the chirping stops (at least from the hustler). Then there is one great moment where a pawn tries to capture not one but two knights at once, but Ashley spots it (of course) and after that the result isn't in doubt. It isn't until right at the end that Ashley properly introduces himself, at which point the hustler realises what has just happened.

Andras who?

GM Simon Williams is a very witty and entertaining writer, as well as producing a large number of videos of his chess exploits. Often he will take on challengers on chess.com, recording both the games, and his running commentary. He seems to be a good sport about this, as playing and talking can often be quite difficult to do at the same time.
In one recent video however, he met his when paired against IM sendmeyourbestgames. At first Williams had no idea who he was playing, but even when he did find out, he still didn't know who he was up against. What he was unaware of, was the IM sendmeyourbestgames was in fact Canberra IM Andras Toth. That he was up against quite a strong player slowly dawned on Williams as he went down to two quick defeats. Even in the third game he was on the back foot for most of it, until Toth blundered into a mate, allowing Williams to at least finish with some dignity.
The video is quite fun to watch, and Williams was very gracious in his defeats. Apart from the comedy vale, they also contains a number of good tips on playing certain openings (The Dutch, not the Kings Indian, and the Dragon), and what to do, and not to do, when you are going down in flame.
There are a whole series of these clips btw and after you watch this one (embedded below) who might want to check out the clip of Williams playing the Bongcloud opening on a dare!

Banter!

Miles Patterson tipped me off to a set of very entertaining chess videos that can be found on youtube. The are under the collective name off "Banter Blitz" and consist of recordings of strong players playing online opponents at 5 minute chess, while providing running commentary during the game. The roll call of players taking part is quite strong with Peter Svidler and David Smerdon on the list. But the real highlight are the clips from Miss Strategy (IM Anna Rudolf) and Miss Tactics (IM Sopiko Guramishvili) where they spend a couple of hours playing on chess24.com In one clip Miss Strategy leads the way, while in the second Miss Tactics handles the mouse. Their commentary is both funny and informative, and you could do worse than spend a couple of hours listening to the thought process of some high class blitz players.

Chess Olympiad - Chess players wanna go bad?

I missed the opening ceremony of the 2014 Chess Olympiad (for reasons explained elsewhere), and as a result missed the nice video they put together to celebrate the event. Fortunately it was played at the closing ceremony as well, and I must say, it was very well done. There are a number of famous faces in it, as well as scenes from Tromso, and the wider chess world. It also has a nice soundtrack, which has already proved a hit with the chess club at my local school.
So for those who haven't seen it, here is the 2014 Chess Olympiad Opening Ceremony Video

I'm sure this is a real thing in Russia

Click on the link below for the weirdest start to a chess game I have seen in a long while (NB I did not personally witness the infamous Telfer v Grcic game in the early 90's which *began* with the pieces being swept off the board).
It comes what I assume is a real children's program in Russia. Two kids are about to start a game when they realise a black rook is missing. Rather than find a replacement, or substitute a pencil sharpener,  one of the kids (who looks about 10 years old) builds a lathe out of stuff lying around the house, and then makes a rook out of the left over wood! He even paints and dries it, reading for use in the game against his by now bored opponent.
You can see the whole thing here. Thanks to Andrew Wilkinson for finding this for me, and if any Russian speakers are reading this blog, further information about this clip would be appreciated!

Arbiter videos?

Arbiter videos. Would such a thing work?
What I am thinking of are short online videos that show specific incidents during a chess game, and what decision the arbiter should make. These days such clips are not hard to make, although making them well is the obvious challenge. I might give it a go myself, although I would have to resist the temptation to fall into self parody ("Welcome to the exciting world of chess arbiting. I'm your host, Chess Kingington")

Chess on the tube (or how to start your own TV station)

There was a time when owning a television station was restricted to the rich and the few. However this all changed with the arrival of the internet, and more specifically youtube. So now if you have a PC and a camera, you can have a TV station of your own.
Of course this ability to produce and distribute your own content has made it a crowded and competitive field. And not just in the area of stupid cat videos, but also in fields like chess. There are a number of Chess 'stations' in operation, some connected with other chess resources (such as playing sites) and some existing on their own.
A new entry into the market is Bundy Chess. It is a youtube channel run by IM Andras Toth, and has an emphasis on chess puzzles and the demonstration of chess beauty (NB He explains what he means by this in his first video). The channel has only been running for a month but already has plenty of content, with 24 videos up at last count. Each clip runs for between 2 and 6 minutes so you can digest them in bite-sized chunks. Every clip is intended teach you something, so if you are looking for a way to improve you chess, or just to see some very nice puzzles, visit Bundy Chess at youtube.

Bill Gates gets butt kicked at chess

To be fair to Bill Gates it was World Champion Magnus Carlsen on the other side of the board. The game took place on a Norwegian Chat show and Carlsen spotted Gates a time handicap of 30 seconds v 2 minutes. Despite Gates best efforts Carlsen needed 12 seconds to checkmate on of the worlds richest men.
The description of the match can be found here, while the video of the actual game is here.

Most popular chess video on youtube - an update

Updating a post I did last year on youtube videos and chess.

I have revisited youtube in the hope of finding out what is the current most popular video on youtube to do with chess. Last year I found this somewhat difficult I was not able to order videos by popularity, but this seems to have now changed. There is an option to sort by number of views, making my job far easier (Of course this might have been there last year and I failed to see it!)
It turns out the winning video has a lot to do with chess, without being a 'chess' video. It is a clip from from the 1980's musical 'Chess', with Murray Head singing 'One night in Bangkok'. In fact second place is also held by the same film clip (posted by a different user) while 'How to make a Chess Cake' comes in at 4. Only after that do 'real' chess videos appear!

Rugby meets Chess

Apparently chess is under threat from under utilised rugby players. At least that is what this advertisement would have us believe. Of course the first thing I noticed was that they were playing on one of the smallest boards I have seen (at least on television), and secondly 'King capture. Really?'.

What is the most popular chess video on Youtube?

As an exercise, I decided to track down the most popular chess video on Youtube. The first part of this quest was quite easy, as I simply typed "chess" in the search box. Turns out there are approximately 185,000 videos with the word "chess" in the title on youtube. But after that my search became somewhat harder. While I can get lots of chess videos, I don't seem to be able to order them by number of views. So the first couple of pages were a mixture of heavily viewed videos (100,000+), and some more recent additions (7,000 views).
So in the absence of being able to do this scientifically I've had to use Eyeball 1.0 to make a guess. Without spending too much time on the process I'm suggesting the "Speed Chess Game" video, with 1.7 million views is a front runner. It is about 6 years old and showed a bullet game between Max Dlugy and Hikaru Nakamura. I'll embed it here if you have not seen it already.

Keep the weekend free

As I've stated before, FIDE is a pretty transparent organisation, which is a little surprising given the amount of criticism it receives. Most of its meetings are open to the public, and its agendas and minutes are made freely available on the web, for anyone to read or comment on.
This year the transparency went even further, with Sevan Muradian from the North American Chess Association filming a lot of the proceedings and posting it up on Youtube. While it may not make the most riveting viewing, it does provide an insight into how the FIDE General Assembly and FIDE Commissions work. Be warned, even in 30 minute chunks there are around 40 videos online, and you may have to try and guess where the interesting parts are. The commission videos are probably more interesting than the GA, but if you are looking to see just one FIDE chess meeting video this year, I would recommend the debate over cost recovering from the Federations who lost their court cases to FIDE.
The videos are available on the North American Chess youtube channel.

If not TV, at least Youtube

Alana Chibnall has reminded me of the XChess Championship, which is an ambitious project to bring chess to TV (or youtube for now). I've had a quick look at the first episode, and it looks like they have brought some fantastic production values to the project. I suspect they are using the 'a new shot every 3 seconds' approach to editing, which was once pointed out to me as the cornerstone of all sports coverage.
The XChess Challenge was an 8 player knockout event, involving some young American players, with games played at a speed of G/20m. As with any good sports show, they also have player introductions/bio's as well as a little bit of the 'trash talk' that Xtreme sports seem to have.
You can watch the 4 episodes of the first series on youtube. This link takes you to all the videos, as well as a couple of extras that they have put up.

Testing new media

Over the last week or so I've been playing with a few gizmo's, and a few new ways of doing things (new to me anyway).
The first toy was a new video camera, which I hope to use to make videos of tournaments etc. I tested it out a Street Chess today, and you can see the results below.
While working on the editing of the piece (10 or so minutes down to 45 seconds), I ran across the speech recognition software that comes with Vista. It has been a couple of years since I did anything with speech recognition (I built a conversation system for a robot a few years back) but I thought I'd give it another shot. It seems to work ok, but what I tried to get it to do, is to input games into Chessbase by reading the scoresheet. Sadly this failed on two levels. The first is that I have yet to work out how to get the speech recognition system to understand basic phrases like "e2e4". The second is that Chessbase has very limited support for keyboard input, which is necessary to enter the moves from the speech recognition system.
The other area I've been investigating is Google+. In a sense this is just a different type of Facebook, but it has the benefit of not actually being Facebook. What I hope to use Google+ for is for simple video conferencing. It supports conferences of up to 10 people, which may make some of my chess admin work a little easier. I'm also keen to try and use it to do live tournament reports, as well as things like arbiter training.

And speaking of chess videos

Having highlighted the Kasparov v Short video in yesterdays post, I cam across another source of online videos today.
Kerry Stead has his own blog, melbournegamescoach.blogspot.com There are two things that make this different from most chess blogs. Firstly it has a number of videos that Kerry has made himself, and secondly, it covers the other thing that Kerry is quite good at, poker. He has produced a couple of videos of his games from the recent Ryde-Eastwood tournament, as well as a couple of poker videos. He has also promised to produce a video series on the evil 'Broken Arrow' variation of the Modern ( 1.e4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.Nc3 c5 4.d5 Bxc3+). As I have found this one of the more annoying lines to face as white, I'm certainly looking forward to it.

Thanks Nige and Garry

The chess nostalgia circuit rolls on, with Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short reliving past challenges by playing an 8 game blitz match in Belgium today (which also happens to be my birthday). It is being organised by YourNextMove, which is a Belgium foundation that aims to promote chess in the 6 to 12 years age group. The event website will have video coverage and commentary of the match.
If you can't get out of bed early enough to watch the games, or find that you are reading this on Monday morning at work, you can watch the two players go around some 24 years ago.

Pawn Stars

Flipping through today's TV guide I became quite excited at the discovery of a show called 'Pawn Stars'. "Have to watch that" I said to the wife, who simply gave me a dirty look in reply. "No, not that sort of show" I continued, "P-A-W-N Stars. Surely it must be about chess"
But of course it wasn't. It was about a real Pawn Shop, where people borrow money against the value of items they put up as collateral. Apparently it is quite a popular show, but not so interesting for me.
However, to make up for missing out on a bit of chess on TV, here is a video that GM Ian Rogers alerted me to. Chess Wars!

Chess and Robots - on film

I've spent part of today giving some high school students a basic introduction to University Robotics. And I didn't mention chess once! To make up for that oversight here are a couple of videos that combine robots and chess.
The first is a large chess board with lego robots as pieces. The video is a littrle long, but it is worth looking at the second half to see how it all works.

The second s a robotic fail, where a robot arm fails to complete the task of moving a piece, instead deciding to wipe out part of the board instead. Given the choice of 'Yakety Sax' as the soundtrack, and the voice over, I suspect this may have happened by design rather than by accident.