First Live Tournament Coverage
Yesterday we did our first live coverage of a chess event, with the last round of the super exciting NH Tournament in Amsterdam. This event pits a team of "Rising Stars" vs a team of "Experience" in a pairing system known as "Schevenningen," wherein each member of one team plays everyone on the other team, but nobody on their own team. In this case, it was a double-round event: each player played white and black against each member of the opposing team. The "experience" team this year was given a boost with some rather young players, but who nevertheless have a good amount of top-level experience.
From a sporting standpoint, the most important "action" of the day was already finished by the time we started our broadcast (we skipped the first hour of slow opening moves largely because, as broadcasters, we are aiming for 3-4 hour broadcasts rather than 6 hours). With a quick draw, 24-year-old Dutch Champion Jan Smeets had clinched the top score of any member of the Rising Stars team, thus earning the big prize: an invitation to next year's Melody Amber Tournament.
From a chess point of view, the most important action was just heating up. The two games I had selected to broadcast did prove to be very interesting, and were the only two games with decisive results. If you want to watch our coverage, you can still do so on-demand at www.chess.com/tv . But my main reason for posting this is that if you *did* see the coverage, and wanted to look over the games, I am uploading them here in the viewer. These were great games by the two top-scoring members of the "experience" team to put an exclamation point on their own events and their team's overall victory.
5-time Russian Champ, Peter Svidler
This first game is a clash between the current U.S. and Russian Champions:
