Thursday 15 July 2010

Not quite instant chess

These days every major tournament carries live coverage of their games. The motivation for this is, apart from keeping up with the Jonses, is to get the tournament name (and the sponsors name) out into the chess world. Given that chess still hasn't cracked it as a television sport, this is the next best thing.
For example Dortmund starts this evening, and chess junkies can stay up to watch the live coverage, channel 'hopping' with Le Tour and the Australian v Pakistan cricket (or try my decadent set-up of Foxtel for the cricket, TV-tuner stick on my netbook for the cycling, and web browser next to it for the chess).
But if this overload of information is doing your head in, you can always go for something a little bit slower. The ICCF webchess website provides coverage of a number of their events, at a more sedate pace of 10 moves in 30 or 40 days! They even provide a direct link to the top 20 games (based on rating) in progress at the moment, if you just want to watch the big boys. You can drop in at your leisure, peruse a couple of games, safe in the knowledge that you can go to sleep knowing the game will most likely still be going when you wake up!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As an old bastard in training I remember well the "Master Game" chess shown on ABC in the late 70's, early 80's.

We all wrote to the ABC but in the end the Mastergame program was removed.

The internet has caused the worm to turn full circle. Chess is ideally suited to the internet and I love following the chess on the net with the moves shown in real time and often live radio commentary as well.

We're spoilt !

Tennis and cricket coverage via the net, in comparison, sucks. ha ha. Ha.

cheers
Garrett.

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