I treated myself to a ChessBase Fritz Trainer DVD recently, 943Mb of files crammed into one corner of a 4.7Gb disc.\u00a0 Nearly all the space is taken up with movies of a balding middle-aged guy stumbling through commentary like:<\/p>\n
” Erm… Now, I’ll show you… er… one of my own games… um… er… playing Black against… um… er… er… um… Z Grophulous in the New York open in 1985… er… yeah…” [names changed to protect the guilty, but that’s a transcript]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, I’m quite happy to have audio commentary, even when it’s as under-rehearsed as this, so at least I can follow the moves on the board without having to look somewhere else on the screen for the commentary: that seems to be a good use of the technology.\u00a0 But I can do without actually watching the guy sweating under the lights… Does it really add to the experience?\u00a0 Why would I want to look at the author and not the chessboard?\u00a0 I have a strong feeling that, with the latest ChessBase products, we have a case of “we can do this, so we should do this”.\u00a0 Maybe if it was someone as important as Fischer or charismatic as Kasparov I’d change my mind, but currently I think it’s a waste of effort.<\/p>\n
And surely that disc space could have been better used?\u00a0 There are only 114 games on this disc, and most of them don’t have commentary. The previous generation of products, CDs, used audio to make just a few important points (rather than waffle over every move) and included a good-sized database with many annotated games, which to my mind is better value.<\/p>\n
[We seem to be repeating the problems with chess videos: all format and little content. Once I transcribed the moves from one video, and it came to less than 2 sides of A5.\u00a0 How many A5 pages do you get in a book costing as much?]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I treated myself to a ChessBase Fritz Trainer DVD recently, 943Mb of files crammed into one corner of a 4.7Gb disc.\u00a0 Nearly all the space is taken up with movies of a balding middle-aged guy stumbling through commentary like: ” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-class-g"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2012,"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011\/revisions\/2012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devonjuniorchess.co.uk\/wp\/drdaveexeter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}