I was wondering if any of you know any great group of free chess videos. I know of a few:

1) kingscrusher on youtube. (http://www.youtube.com/user/kingscrusher)
2) chessvideos.tv - curtains (obv) and Zibbit both great, who else? (http://www.chessvideos.tv)
3) chessnetwork on youtube (not nearly as frequently updated as I'd like) (http://www.youtube.com/user/ChessNetwork)

If anyone has any good suggestions of collections of good free videos, please list them here.

I do my own videos, too (on youtube). They aren't nearly as good as any of the others, but lower rated players might learn something (and I've had higher rated players tell me they are at least entertaining). Here is my channel. I think I have somewhere around 30 or 40 videos by now and I'm making more almost every day. They are mostly for me as a motivational tool, but if others get good out of them, great.

Here is my channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Gorgonian

Always looking for good videos from players rated higher than I am. Which are your favorites?

(I am about 1600 ftr)

Nice thread idea. Besides kingscrusher, here are the ones I watch:

1) Alexandra Kosteniuk: http://www.youtube.com/chessqueen
No new ones in a while. The old ones were full games, more recent ones just fragments. Live blitz games with her thoughts. One of the strongest players you can find online. And I love her voice.

2) Henrik Danielsen: http://www.youtube.com/krakkaskak
GM who promotes the Polar Bear system (Bird's opening). But you can also learn about various aspects of the game from him or see over 100 live-annotated blitz games.

3) http://www.youtube.com/ChessVibes
You can see super-GMs going over their games from the biggest tournaments in the world. Not only will you learn, but you will finally find out what those players sound like!

You're not joking on that latter half. The first time I heard Peter Svidler talk, I just about flipped. That's just not right.

/ot

These aren't amazingly deep or anything, but I enjoy this channel for some good basics:

http://www.youtube.com/user/jrobichess

I was thinking of posting this too, but I couldn't remember his name. I never really loved his channel or watched many of his videos, but you're probably right that it's good for the basics. A lot of people seem to like him, so he must be good for something.

Btw, I tried making some videos myself today. I don't know how people do this! It's hard to talk while playing a blitz game. I kept having two problems:

1) I'm not so good at explaining my thoughts. I can move my mouse around to point at things and give some ideas, but there's too much to explain. And I get all the squares and files wrong because I'm thinking more abstractly and don't know where I actually am on the board.

2) Whenever I have to start thinking hard, I lose focus on the talking so I start to mumble. I become hard to hear and understand at the very moments that my thoughts would be most useful!

If I get this going well, I'll post my page.

Haha boy do I know that feeling. I have found that when I'm not concentrating on it I don't know any of the names of pieces or board squares. You do get better at it with practice, but I've found I can't take the time I need at even 15 0 when I'm talking. It gets a bit better with time.

Write a script ahead of time, do some practicing and don't be afraid to edit your audio and video tracks separately.

That's pretty tough to do for videos where you are playing the game live.

http://www.youtube.com/user/thechesswebsite

He does alot of different videos, from openings to famous games and other stuff as well. I really like the way he explains things, not too simple and not too complicated. I really wish he uploaded videos more frequently.

Ok, so I went ahead and finally posted 2 of the videos I made. I found that I was playing better while making these (and I have more than a 2 video sample size, but all the others recorded my whole desktop instead of just the board, so the board is too small imo so I got rid of them). So even if no one else likes them for anything, they seem good for my chess.

I do run lower on time than usual, but I think I was winning more. I'm busy this weekend, but on Monday or Sunday night I'll probably make some more.

Enjoy, and don't laugh (to my face). I'll attempt to follow any suggestions: http://www.youtube.com/user/hamstergang (also, now you all see the username I had that spawned this one)

Cool videos. I think if you could improve the audio clarity it would help a lot. Also that board is...

:/

Good videos though. Keep it up, I love having stuff like this to watch.

Thanks. Not sure what I can do about the audio (I'm not sure where my mic is even), but I can certainly talk more clearly and maybe loudly. What don't you like about the board ?

I don't think the audio's that bad. It's certainly not professional quality, but it's acceptable. And your voice isn't bad for something like this. I've certainly heard a lot worse.

If you are planning on doing these for instructional purposes, I'd come back to recording the game on video, then doing the audio track separately and later. It's just too hard to talk instructively on the fly, and your video is full of a lot of pauses while you think.

I think there's definite potential here, though.

It's a bit, what's the word, garish? I'm one that prefers clean and simple with board graphics. Just a taste thing, though. I don't like a lot of contrast between light and dark squares and those squares not only have a lot of contrast (and texture noise), but the textures' grains run in perpendicular directions. So it's like a train wreck at every border

(just for me--different people like different things)

I do hope you keep it up and not worry about my nitpicking stuff--just giving a perspective.

I do a few videos on CVTV but they're usually intermediate 15 min videos instead of the GM 5 minute videos Curtains/Zibbit do

same handle

I've watched a few of them, wt. They are entertaining. Do some more!

This Reddit thread is the motherlode of chess videos:

http://www.reddit.com/r/chess/commen...es_on_youtube/

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMxK1FKAbmj2N-faTWLwNig is a great channel that nobody has mentioned yet. Kingcrusher's channel is definitely my favourite though! It's funny; when I'm not that busy, I wish he'd post more videos yet when I'm busy I seem to get too far behind and miss loads of videos!

Yeah, I can't believe that THE Youtube star (pronounced 'Mahto Yelich') whose channel is linked in the prev post, a coach from Adelaide and currently the 158th player of Australia with local rating 2000 (FIDE ones are normally 100 points higher but he has too little time to either travel or play online), hasn't been mentioned on 2+2 before F_Ivanovic passed ahead of me by several hours to mention him His cute Croatian accent, soothing voice, humour, brevity, clarity and adequate speed of presentation would make the dead to play attacking chess and see proverbial 'killa moves'.

GM Niclas Huschenbeth has recently started making instructional videos in English (in addition to German ones), incl. the 'Blitz & Talk' series (live 3-5-minute games on chess24)... what do you, people, think of this? At least I'm giving him credit for making YT videos daily despite being a GM since as early an age as 20 (he's 22 now), it's a rare thing.

The way he inserts ads is surely annoying, but I just load a video slightly in advance and switch the sound off while the opening ad is running

Chessnetwork and the live games from chessexplained are pretty much the only things I can put up with. Everything else is just too academic sounding. Those guys are more conversational and don't make me feel like I'm sitting in a bad lecture hall.

Ditto, I couldn't have phrased it better With Niclas, though, there's some hope that he's young and his style isn't well-defined yet and he may change his mind and become less boring eventually as he learns to talk (especially now, after he lost a dual commentary match to CE and hopefully watched his coverage of it in full ).