July 3, 2009

Sparkassen Chess-Meeting 2009

The original live broadcast can be found here.

3 comments:

 
author victor hugo diaz p
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victor hugo diaz p said...

..how can i do that in my blog?
That`s wonderful to relay direct games..
Thx
Vìctor

 
author Nikolai Pilafov
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Nikolai Pilafov said...

Hi Victor,
The task of relaying games in real time in synch with the official site is dependant on the “TFD Proxy” script which is a separate product. Under the hood, it has to deal with some rather challenging issues and quite often a particular tournament would require some specific adjustments to be made. Shortly, I can only support the product here on my blog and the live-relay based on “TFD Proxy” script is not going to work elsewhere.

 
author Nikolai Pilafov
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Nikolai Pilafov said...

The official site is quite slow to broadcast the very first move and the delay was (round 7) as big as 25min and 13sec. According to the tournament’s rules the delay is defined to be 15min. I don’t remember any other tournaments with such a delay and I would like to share my disappointment about this alarming trend. Here are my thoughts:

The only reason for using a delay like that is, apparently, cheating concerns. IMO that argument is very weak and should be dismissed because:

1) A player who is interested in cheating can definitely afford to have somebody in the playing hall or some other (more sophisticated) way of communicating the moves;

2) A player of Super-GM’s caliber doesn’t need to cheat on every single move. Once a cheater reaches a critical position they can easily afford to “wait” for a computer move and take the additional 15min of punishment. It is very common for a human (with no intend of cheating) to spend much more time in the key positions anyway;

3) Such a delay really and painfully hurts the chess fans. In my mind, millions of chess-loving people who try to follow the game are more important than some paranoid attitude against cheating.