Everything is out there!

Posted by GilaChess

November 10, 2008

Pre-warning:- This is going to be one of those “back when I was young” articles

Back then, chess materials were so hard to come by. Books were scarce in my town (i.e. zero chess books sold in the local bookshops) and you had to go to KL to buy one. Even then, they were expensive and as students we did not know which books were worthy to invest in.

Today, books are still relatively expensive but the choices has multiplied a hundred time. Chess vendors like Mok, Balendran, Stonemaster, Rizal, Joseph Toh, Jax Tham, IntChess, Thomas Voon etc makes it even easier to get books, software, equipments and magazine related to chess.

The internet is full of chess material too. Both legal and illegal! Tools like Bit Torrent now have almost every major chess book digitised in PDF and scanned form like DJView. This is of course not legal but is definitely an attractive option to chess enthusiasts who cannot afford to or just don’t want to spend the money on buying original chess books. Some people actually pay good money for the pirated goods because they simply don’t know how to go about downloading it. I’m not condoning piracy but it is a fact today and it’s the same problem that affects the movie and music industry. If it can be digitised, it can be pirated. No surprise that chess materials such as Chess DVDs and Chess books are heavily pirated. One good example is Pocket Fritz 3. The pirated copy was out just after a month the original was released. Admittedly, this will discourage authors of chess books and chess software from publishing better materials in the long run

Illegal options aside, there are tons of free materials from sites like Chessville.com and chess.About.com - just to name two. Book reviews are also plentiful making it so much easier for chess book selection.

Just for this I think it’s a great time to be a chess teenager. It’s not too late for busy professional however. Chess development and training is no longer something difficult. The trouble is that keeping up with quality material out on the web. There is just too much out there and vetting through what is good and what is not is time consuming. Perhaps what is needed is someone or some website that is dedicated to facilitate and filter materials from the web and any digital and print material. I think this would be one of the key skills of a chess coach nowadays - to become facilitators to the abundant chess materials today and assign appropriate reading materials, chess exercises and games to study to his or her student(s) accordingly. The modern chess coach has to be web savvy too. I’m still waiting (hoping) for a well organised Chess e-Learning system to appear soon.

Some tips:

Print material. Cut out magazines and newspaper articles (though rare now in Malaysia) and keep them in a “To Read” folder. Read in those moments you are waiting for a meeting to start or during transit in travelling.

Digital material. Bookmark those useful chess videos you found on YouTube or other video sites. If you have an iPod download lectures off of iTunes and watch or listen to them while working (that’s one of my favourite things to do in the office - listening not watching!). A good bookmarking tool to use is www.delicious.com which let’s you save those URL gems online so it is accessible anywhere. If you have a PDA/smartphone, you can easily convert and store the text in your device to be read later.

An alternative to having expensive iPods or PDA is to get one of those MP4/MP3 video players and iPod Nano clones which have become relatively cheap now. You can probably get a cheap but decent portable MP4 video player for about RM 100-200 (~USD 25-50) today. Download the chess videos to your PC and transfer them to your portable device to be viewed “on the go”.

With today’s youth pre-occupied with Playstations (PSPs) and Nintendos (DS lite) and having short attention spans, short instructional videos are just ideal.

GilaChess Thoughts

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