Links to my chess videos and stay tuned for a new one uploading now
Hi. This post is a collection of links to the chess videos I have created so far, in addition to some comments about chess.com.
My chess videos are heavy on observations , light on variations, and generally around an hour long each. One of them is about tactics and what to think about when solving tactics. I am uploading one as I type and it should be live in a few hours.
When I first signed on to chess.com I was pretty ecstatic about the site and the community and the ability to make articles, etc. I signed up as a teacher and received a few students, so it's been very positive for me.
Eventually the excitement died down and I stopped checking the site every few hours to see my games. In fact I would leave them going for 3 days and if you see all my latest losses, they're all on time, from winning positions. Unfortunately chess.com only notifies you about a game that's about to end 8 hours before the end of it. Maybe there is a setting somewhere but I think it should really be more like a day and a half before the game is finished, because people do not check their email that often.
Unfortunately, my chess.com rating suffered, and I went from around 1875 to 1700. I don't want to start any new games though because I don't take correspondence chess seriously enough at chess.com. I think 'live' chess is preferable unless you are going to take your correspondence games very seriously. Instead I was spending around 1-10 minutes on each move, often just a few seconds. It is strange, when you have more time to decide your moves, you actually put in less effort. I would like to play a very very serious chess.com game against a strong player, which would produce a higher quality game than I've ever played over-the-board most likely, but I'm not in the mood for it right now.
Well, here is a copy of my blog post, with the links to the videos. If you watch any of them, please leave me feedback. Thanks! - Zenchess
This link will be updated to contain all my videos...
Jacob Wagner vs David Balash USCF tournament
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8061619294337323195
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5020404794811255869
Jacob Wagner vs. Jay Harmon USCF tournament
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3823543606122860429
Chess Tactics
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7195913708542388139
Blue devil knight vs ferad ICC
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1822647337083644693
Jacob Wagner vs ferad ICC
I have created a few annotated chess videos (free of course). To my suprise if you type 'annotated chess videos' on google one of them will be very high up in the page rankings.
All of my videos combined had over 11,000 views, though the reports page now shows all videos at "0". Hmm.
I will keep this blog entry up to date with links to all the videos I create. I also plan to make a video podcast available. If in doubt, go to google video and search for "Zenchess". (I am uploading one as we speak and it should be live in a couple hours).
The video I'm uploading now is against David Balash, check for that soon. The chess tactics instructional video does not have the greatest audio - the original copy I have has great audio, except google video keeps messing this one up. I should be able to fix this soon. Note that even though the video says "better audio" in reality, the audio is still bad. When I fix it I guess I'll name it "fixed audio".
My lectures usually focus on ideas and observations that I think would be helpful to lower-rated players, although occasionally I will say something that I think stronger players could benefit from as well. It is very possible and likely that I have made mistakes in my analysis. I do NOT prepare these analysis sessions with computers. In fact, I think computer analysis is highly over-rated and is far distanced from real human chess and understanding. In other words, when I analyze a game, I try to give advice that a real human could follow during a game. I do not analyze millions of moves per second or have an assistant computer do that so therefore I do not recommend you play moves that only computers would find.
I am available to give lessons for serious students. Go to chess.com and search for zenchess for more info, or drop me a message at zenchess.com (click on forum). My rates are very reasonable.
