My Craziest Game Ever, part 2: Now up on ChessVideos.tv
This is must-see TV! If you haven't seen part 1 yet, check that out first, and then see the conclusion of my wildest, nuttiest, most preposterous tournament game ever! Here are the links:
Part 1
Part 2
It's free and available on-demand, but Americans especially shouldn't wait. Now that it's Thanksgiving, and what better way is there to feel grateful for the amazing game of chess than by looking at exciting and ridiculous battles like the one in the video?
Part 1
Part 2
It's free and available on-demand, but Americans especially shouldn't wait. Now that it's Thanksgiving, and what better way is there to feel grateful for the amazing game of chess than by looking at exciting and ridiculous battles like the one in the video?
Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on
Wednesday November 21, 2007 at 11:03pm
Early on, the volume kind of kept going up and down at my end. A highly entertaining game.
You're not the only one doing unsound sacking in critical team games. In a match situation I played the Ghulam Kassim line of the King's Gambit. Even though I escaped with a draw, my teammates got a little angry with me (I suppose that has something to do with me playing the Halloween Gambit a round earlier...).
Strange, I'd never heard of that label before, though I was familiar with the variation. Glad you escaped with a draw.
Steven:
I think people presenting games in a video format like this (albeit not online) is older than databases (where my game can be found), so if you want a "more traditional format" you'll have to go back in time and watch me play it.
I meant a score with written annotations, no clutter, no video, no audio, me and a chess board and your notes....
I remember the old studies about learning and how little was retained from a video lecture; in my view you learn with maximum interactivity and that would be a score I have to play over and follow the notes, etc. I bet if you did a study on retention, video would score lowest in the learning of chess information.....
I've tried buying some of those CB DVDs but I find they make chess boring - and I didn't think anything could do that!
Steven the Dinosaur
I sometimes have trouble committing the moves themselves to paper, never mind annotations!
It's not that I knew the KG line by another name; rather, I had just never seen any name attributed to it. Happily, this isn't a weird name at all, but the name of an Indian player who used the line in the 1820s. (At least that's what I found on the internet, which is so rarely wrong...)
Steven:
I didn't lead you around (much): the game is available on the internet, but without annotations (except on the video).
You raise an interesting and important point about effective learning, and I'm inclined to think your negative judgment about videos is partially right - and partial in two different ways.
The first is learning styles. Some people have a visual learning style, and for them DVDs and other video presentations work very well. From your comments, it sounds like that's not how you operate. That's fine, but not universal.
The second way is that the viewer, regardless of his learning style, need not sit passively, waiting for information to be poured into his head like water into a bucket (or spaghetti against a wall, to see if it sticks). Whenever I watch video presentations, I'm trying to figure things out while the speaker's talking. I'll often pause it if something catches my eye, and when it's a ChessBase product I'll even stop it and analyze, check an idea with the engine, etc. You can't do that directly with my ChessVideos presentation, but you could create a board in CB in an adjacent window and do the same thing.
In fact, I think that's even better than the traditional written approach for a couple of reasons. One is that you don't have the annoyance and distraction of head-up, head-down with the book. The second is that it's hard without a lot of self-discipline and the further annoyance of an index card to avoid seeing the notes before working things out for yourself.
So while you should gear your studying to the way you learn best, it's often possible to transform other modalities to your advantage.
Dennis, that's one of the reasons I like these kind of videos. The ability to pause. Or as IM dr. Kopec put it, 'take a look and stop'. I've always been pleased by my ability to spot the 'master move' in most games, those few moves that separates the titled players from us (lower) mortals. Sadly, before getting there I'd have made a number of moves pushing the game in a different direction (which is not to say my decisions are bad).
That's usually what I'm looking for in chess videos, not what way they go at the crossroads, but which lane they use before getting there. Your videos have been a help. :)
As to the ability to pause, with a score in a book, you can pause as well, can't you? Don't even need to hit a button, Perseus....
I do that at times, covering up moves, but I find it inefficient with books because subconsciously I will have scanned ahead. Some books I've read do leave a few extra lines blank to prevent that, but that's usually for the key moves which I will usually find.
Naturally, a lot of books go vertical in their movelist format, and for those books it 'sort of' works better but still I have the same issue because white's and black's moves are still relatively close to eachother. (Making it hard for me to cover up the move and not accidentally seeing even a part of it).
That said, I know that a chess book isn't the best medium for me to learn and improve with.
I don't know how it's elsewhere, but in these parts (school) a lot of teachers are 'a generation too old' for the job. The education system changed too much for them to assume students will study the way they did. Most of these won't even know it, much less adapt.
Incompetence is incompetence at any age.
But, you're right Steven, incompetence is incompetence. Dennis is competent :)
Thanks for the video, it was a real treat to see all those wild variations. One quick question: in Part 2, in the Q vs. R endgame at 39:48, you mention that Black's candidate move Qb7-b8 "wouldn't make any difference". What was your intended reply for White? More specifically, if White plays d8=Q in that position, then ...Qxd8+ seems to end up in positions a tempo down from those discussed earlier, so that the Reti-like Ke6 idea doesn't work anymore and Black wins with b3-b2 and c5-c4-c3-c2. Meanwhile, I'm having a hard time being convinced by Ke7-e6 (the latter after ...Qf8). Am I missing something?
(Forgive me if this doesn't make any sense!)