Chess Fritz Trainer - Viktor Kortchnoi: My Life for Chess Vol. 1 & 2
English | WMV3 640x480 | MP3 96 Kbps | 1.94 GB
Genre: eLearning
At 73 the former double world championship challenger is still going strong, playing active and attractive chess in top tournaments. Now he has spoken about a career that spans more than five decades and six generations of opponents, in his own electrifying style. Two fascinating DVDs on a life devoted to chess ?we bring you the story and sample videos.
Viktor Kortchnoi is doubtlessly one of the most electrifying personalities in the world of chess. At 73 the former double world championship finalist is still playing successful and attractive chess, teaching the young Turks lesson after lesson in tournament after world-class tournament. He has a career that spans so many decades and is filled with so many encounters that one can scarcely believe it has all happened in the lifetime of a single person.
Kortchnoi is not just famous for brilliancy in chess, he is also well-known for his candidly expressed opinions, his no-nonsense language and his volatile temperament. He is a volcano not just ready to go off, he is one that regularly erupts and spews molten lava over the countryside. There is hardly a chessplayer who hasn抰 been burnt.
On the other hand Viktor loves chess. You can see it in every statement he makes, the way he moves around a tournament hall, the time he spends there even after his own game is over. And he can be lavish in his praise of an opponent who has done well, who has impressed him with a deep strategic game or a tactical brilliance. Players come out of postmortems flushed or devastated, depending on how Viktor Kortchnoi evaluates their game.
When we decided to make a series of DVDs with Kortchnoi I must confess that I was a bit nervous. Even in normal conversation Viktor Lvovich, whom I have known for over two decades now, is always very intense. No small talk, any question or remark can elicit a profound, witty, or caustic response. Since he is doing that in a foreign language, and since he is never willing to compromise his high standard of erudition, the conversation is sometimes ponderous. You have to wait for many seconds while he thinks. He will pause in mid-sentence and search for a word. He will go back and correct the previous sentence when a better expression has occurred to him.
How would this play out in a video recording, where the speaker is expected to be fluid and eloquent? It was with some trepidation that I took a seat behind the camera in our December recording session in the Hamburg 揝tudio ChessBase?(where Garry Kasparov and others have made a series of wonderful training CDs). Viktor had spent half an hour receiving technical instructions, we had given him IM Oliver Reeh, just out of the picture, to help with the computer operation when he needed it, and he had briefly flipped through his new autobiography 揗ein Leben f黵 das Schach?(My Life for Chess, Olms Verlag, 2004). Light, camera, and action!
Well, that is what you get with the new DVDs of Viktor Kortchnoi 揗y Life for Chess? volumes one and two. These videos are replayed using ChessBase 9, Fritz 8 or any compatible chess program (Junior, Shredder), or with the ChessBase Reader that is provided on the DVD. The actual video recordings contain invisible instructions that tell the above programs what the speaker was doing during the recording: which moves he was replaying or entering, which arrows were drawn or squares marked. The instructions are executed synchronous with the video playback. You can see that the speaker is moving a piece, while it moves on the chessboard. A perfect way to present chess.
The videos, might I add, are of very high quality, taken with studio lights, a professional video camera and high quality microphones for the sound recording.
In volume one Kortchnoi presents eight of his most interesting games from the years 1949-1979. Among them games against Smyslov, Geller, Tal, H黚ner and Karpov. The highlight is certainly an encounter with Karpov during the match for the world championship in Baguio 1978. All in all, 揗y Life for Chess Vol. 1?offers more than three hours of first-class chess training, plus an extensive interview.
Volume 2 features about four hours of 揔ortchnoi unplugged? The chess legend portraits the second part of his eventful career, presenting among other things his games against Kasparov (1986), Spassky (1989) and Short (1990), all in the same gripping style. Embedded in the game commentaries are many details of Kortchnoi抯 biography. For instance, before commenting his game against Spassky, the veteran speaks extensively about his personal relationship towards the ex-world champion. Throughout these lectures you can feel his ever-enduring love for chess. Whenever he gets to the heart of an opening (King抯 Indian, English and French) or shows an astonishing move, you can see the joy sparkling from his eyes. No wonder ?hardly any other chess genius has lived a chess life as intensively as 揤iktor the Terrible?
System requirements: Pentium-Processor at 300 Mhz or higher, 64 MB RAM, Windows XP, Windows Vista, DVD drive, mouse, soundcardScreenshot
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