Extreme Chess Championship

[curtains]

Originally Posted by mightytiny

1. I really enjoyed featuring youth in this series.

2. I would like to see more of the middlegame and less of the focus on the opening unless one of the players loses material in the opening.

3. Call me daft...are there prizes for placing in this?

4. I enjoyed the "indian" type music at the start.

5. Enjoyed Jenn's commentary but I kept having this song ring through my head while listening to her commentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufYYO...eature=related

Looking forward to more videos.

Great job promoting chess

Thanks for watching! There were prizes but for this season we decided not to advertise them as it was a super low budget thing. (i.e. lots of people doing work for free). Although we did have some sponsors, a few of whom are 2+2 members! Special thanks to Chisness for his generous donation! Also to NewtBuggs!

[AmarilloJim1]

Originally Posted by curtains

Episode two has been released:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FZb6R0GhHc

We look forward to your comments as always!

Great job curtains...I enjoyed this video a little more than the first...I was engaged and enjoyed the video...posted the vid on my fb wall and the San Diego Chess Club's site....

Keep it up!

[Cadaz]

I also noticed the clock thing. Second episode was nice.

[curtains]

Episode 3 has been released! As always we look forward to your comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=vl8a8QKAiU8

[Cadaz]

Another nice episode.

[asdfasdf32]

Reading the thread now, but I'd definitely prefer a format similar to that on ESPN during the Kramnik vs Deep Fritz telecast. Yes it was slower, but it was still very interesting to a layman viewer (i.e. me). The episode feels too much like the opening day on the WSOP main event where all you see is all ins, and not enough like the final table.

[curtains]

Do you mean the third episode? Honestly almost every move of each game is in the latest video.. I think it's an unfair to compare this format to only showing all-ins, which basically omits 90% of the actual game play. In the first episode we cut out too much of the action and so we changed it up for episode 2+3, but I'm not sure what else to do at this point other than to have longer stretches of time with the players thinking and not moving, and I doubt that's going to be exciting to the majority of people

[asdfasdf32]

Watching episode 3 now. I really wish I could find the video of the Kramnik/Fritz match. It really was pretty enthralling television (which I never thought I'd say about a chess match). They had a nice graphical setup where the commentators discussed possible move variations and how a particular program rated each move (may have been Deep Junior). It really didn't feel slow at all, even though it was a full length match (may have even been live). They didn't go too in depth with strategy, but certainly didn't dumb anything down as far as I, the layman, could tell.

* Might be Kasparov vs. Fritz X3D I'm remembering. Either way, I can't find a video for the life of me.

[Do it Right]

Ok, I finally nailed down what it is about Jenn's voice that is so grating and it should be easy to fix. At 1:45 here's an accurate transcript:

"So we have Justus and Kassaaa playing in the first roundddddddd.
And we have Alex and ELIOT in the second rounddd.
And they're both going to be GREAT matchesss.
Justus actually JUST beat Kassa's recordddd for the youngest African American master everrr."

Stop dragging out consonants, especially at the end of sentences, and randomly emphasizing words in every other sentence especially when there's no need for emphasis. The exact same speech inflections were used constantly in the game analysis as well and it was just very painful to listen to.

The pre-game interview with Kassa was A+. It came off interesting and thoughtful. The pregame interview with Justus emphasized the problem with having such young stars. It came off as boring and pointless, and emphasized his youthful introversion.

The game itself was much better but it was somewhat distracting when you'd randomly edit in a clip where you remove the board, zoom in on one of the player's noses and then skip several moves. A frame shot including the players' faces at key moments in the game might not be bad a idea especially since they both seemed to be wearing their emotions on their sleeve. So the frame would be the board taking up the top 60% of the frame and the bottom 40% split evenly between the player's faces at certain key moments.

All in all, a decent improvement over the first episode.