Chess Club Black & White (CCBW)

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

BBC Chess Video with Carlsen, Paulson

BBC presenter Ros Atkins takes on World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen in the studio and has a brief chat with London Fide Chess Candidates' organiser Andrew Paulson. The strongest tournament of its kind - the 2013 Candidates Tournament - is being held from March 14 to April 1, 2013, at the IET, Savoy Place, London. FIDE and AGON – the World Chess Federation’s commercial partner – are staging the event. The Prize Fund to be shared by the players totals €510,000. The winner of the Candidates will become the Challenger to Viswanathan Anand who has reigned as World Champion since 2007. The main sponsor of the Candidates Chess is State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic SOCAR.

Visually-Challenged Chess Players: Help Showcase Special Documentary to World Audience: Ian McDonald is a sports sociologist and documentary filmmaker. He has given a very special gift to Indian chess: his documentary 'Algorithms' on blind chess players!

ALGORITHMSIndia | 2012 | HDV | B&W | 109 mins
English, Hindi, Tamil, Odiya with English subtitles

In India, a group of boys dream of becoming Chess Masters, driven by a man with a vision. But this is no ordinary chess and these are no ordinary players. Algorithms is a documentary on the thriving but little known world of Blind Chess in India.

Filmed over three years, Algorithms travels with three talented boys and a totally blind player turned pioneer to competitive national and world championships and visits them in their home milieu where they reveal their struggles, anxieties and hopes.

Going beyond sight and story, this observational sport docu with a difference moves through the algorithms of the blind chess world challenging the sighted of what it means to see. It allows for the tactile and thoughtful journey that explores foresight, sight and vision to continue long after the moving image ends.

The documentary was praised in India and surely, it deserves a bigger international platform. The director and his team are now looking to secure an international premiere at a top film festival outside India. It had its World Premiere at the International Film Festival of India in Nov 2012. It was also a Film Bazaar Recommended (FBR) film at the industry event parallel to IFFI and screeners have been taken by visiting festivals.

For this, the film needs to be regraded. The original picture grading was not done to a big screen projector. But this is expensive. Also, the teams wants to take the desired high quality outputs (HD CAM, DCP etc), which again are very expensive. McDonald's team has little time to raise funds. They have now decided to go down the crowd-funding route with a Kickstarter campaign. The target is £10,000 in 45 days. If they fail to reach the target they get nothing!

Would you like to support this very special chess documentary? Here is the Kickstarter Campaign link for 'Algorithms'.

Crowd funding a project through Kickstarter is slowly becoming the most viable way for documentary filmmakers and now one-third of films that come to festivals are funded this way. In fact, the Oscar award for short documentary went to a Kickstarter film this year!

Here's a special chess book in electronic format as well. ‘Developing Chess Talent’, comprising 256 pages, discusses creating a chess culture, coaching, training, organization and communication. Also included in this title are interviews with grandmasters David Bronstein and Jan Timman, as well as plenty of helpful and practical information. Authors of the book are Dutch psychologists and chess trainers Karel van Delft and IM Merijn van Delft. The book includes a foreword by GM Artur Yusupov with whom they have been collaborating for many years.

The ebook is available in pdf format. It can be accessed by e-reader, PC, tablet and smartphone. Cost of the ebook is 6 euro. It can be ordered via PayPal or bank transfer. The book is recommended for chess trainers by the FIDE Trainers Commission.

For more information and a downloadable preview, visit the website www.chesstalent.com. Also available at the website is a video of IM Merijn van Delft presenting the book in the Max Euwe Centrum in Amsterdam.

Other free items available at the website include 32 training videos of IM Mark Dvoretsky and GM Artur Yusupov as well as articles about chess and nutrition, chess in primary schools, and the Chess Karate Kid sheets.