For quite some time I’ve been following chess commentators on Youtube (John Bartholomew, ChessNetwork and Agadmator are my favourite).
Watching chess videos is sometimes more convenient than reading chess books. Yes, it’s more passive than actively reading and going through the moves on a chessboard. But the nice thing with live commentary is that you can listen to the player’s thoughts live.
I believe recording those videos is also very helpful for the authors to improve their own understanding of how they play the game. So today I challenged myself made my own live commentary while playing a 15+5 game on lichess.org:
NOTE: The audio quality is quite terrible, especially during the first two minutes. I’m currently recording with the embedded mic of a MacbookAir. Any advice on how to improve audio in future videos is welcome.
There will probably more videos of this type in the future:
- It’s a good way to improve my understanding about how I think when playing chess.
- I can listen to myself speaking in English and try to catch grammar or pronunciation mistakes that I wasn’t aware of.
- This prevents me from spending too much time playing chess online. Recording one game is quite demanding in terms of mental energy.
- It’s quite fun to do!