WCC Coverage - Making It Happen

When Erik first asked me in early October what I would be doing to cover the WCC for Chess.com, my initial reaction was that work commitments would prevent me from covering the games live.

But I simply couldn't shake the idea of covering the games LIVE - as they happened.  I had never followed the moves of a World Championship live before, let alone blogged about it, and I realised that I might never get another opportunity to do something so amazing again.

So my mind was made up.  I checked my work diary and discovered I could take leave for most of the games.  For the few games that clashed with meetings; I just re-arranged the meetings!  I have work meetings all the time, and this was the World Championship after all!

So every match day I left work at 12:30pm, catching a train (my local station is pictured!) and then a bus in order to get home in plenty of time to post a news item and prepare to relay the moves by the 2pm start time.

I guess that some people might think that the moves were relayed in some clever and automatic way.  Nope!  I found as many websites as I could that promised live coverage and opened all of them up in separate tabs of my Firefox browser.

During the games, I then monitored them all closely and as soon as a new move was broadcast somewhere I'd post it at Chess.com as quickly as I could.  I soon discovered that of the 7 or 8 websites I was checking out, none of them was consistently the first with new moves!  But whichever one was first with a new move, I was close behind!

It was tricky trying to write sensible comments to the moves whilst also trying to relay them as quickly as possible; I'm not a master by any stretch of the imagination, so I supplemented by own thoughts with ideas I picked up from the other websites (including some in Russian, thanks to Babelfish!) and the analysis of Rybka 3 to make sure I didn't suggest anything that was really stupid!

I hope that the result was enjoyable for everyone who was able to join me for the games as they happened.  Thanks once again to all those who sent me kind messages or comments - it's great to know that it was worthwhile.

As this is the first time Chess.com has covered an event live, I'm sure there are lots of things that could be improved on in the future.  Please let Chess.com know what you liked and what you didn't, so that next time it can be even bigger and better!

Finally, A special thank you to my wife Catherine who put up with me disappearing for hours on end (even more than usual!), and ended up eating dinner by herself on many evenings.  Thanks for understanding my chess addiction and putting up with it...