ChessLecture milestones and upgrades

by on June 11, 2009

As I mentioned in my recent post called “Aloha!”, ChessLecture has recently added a very distinguished teacher to its team: grandmaster Roman Dzindzichashvili. If any of you have thought of subscribing to ChessLecture but weren’t really sure whether it was worth it, this may be a good incentive to give it a try.

ChessLecture has passed another milestone recently that is worth mentioning. Last week, Bill Paschall gave the 1000th lecture on the site! That’s five lectures a week for four years, with never a break in service. (Okay, I think that on one or two occasions, a lecture may have been posted a day late due to server troubles.)

I was lucky enough to give the 1001st lecture, or as I thought of it, to kick off the second thousand. It was called “A Rook Ain’t What it Used to Be.” I talked about a mind-blowing game between Ildar Ibragimov and Gata Kamsky at the recent U.S. Championship, where the two players combined to offer 10 exchange sacrifices (according to my best estimate). Of course, most of those times the offer was not accepted. For an amazingly long period, like ten moves or so, the ordinary values of chess material were suspended and the bishops were worth more than the rooks. There was a comic sequence where Kamsky kept chasing Ibragimov’s bishops around with his rooks, trying to give away a rook for a bishop, but Ibragimov wouldn’t let him do it!

We have another milestone coming up: As of next week, ChessLecture will be supported on your iPhone. Tune in wherever you go! Also, very soon you will be able to watch ChessLectures on a Mac. I think that this particular improvement is long, long overdue. But ChessLecture has a rather small technical staff (like, one person), and making the site Mac-compatible was just not very high on his “to-do” list. However, once he decided to make ChessLecture compatible with the iPhone, he says it did not seem like a whole lot more trouble to make it compatible with the Mac.

So, Mac lovers, get ready to subscribe!

Finally, if any chess addicts out there are going through withdrawal symptoms every weekend because you don’t have any new ChessLectures to listen to on Saturday and Sunday, I have good news for you, too. We are considering the possibility of going to one lecture every day, seven days a week. It’s not decided yet, but I will let you know if I hear anything more about this.

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Ashish June 11, 2009 at 1:46 pm

Mac! iPhone! Sweet as!!

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Andres D. Hortillosa June 12, 2009 at 9:33 am

Hi Dana,
If you can get the technical person or lecturers to include a pgn with the discussed variations, I would consider returning. It is okay to not have a pgn file of the moves if the lecture is about general subjects. But if the lecture is on a specific opening, then the pgn file is a must. The pgn file currently in some of the lectures is just the main line.
Who has the time to keep reviewing the video just to get the variations of the recommended lines right?
Andy

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