You heard about it here first! In my next ChessLecture (which should go up either tomorrow or sometime this week), I will announce a new series that will begin in January 2008, called “Learn from your Fellow Amateurs.” I’m going to ask ChessLecture subscibers to send in their most instructive, interesting, or exciting games, and I will select one game each month to be the topic of my lecture. The administrators of ChessLecture liked this idea so much that they will offer a free month of service on ChessLecture for each month’s winner! I’m very excited about this and I am hoping that subscribers will jump at the chance to share their games.
This idea grew out of Andy Hortillosa’s comments on my post, Thinking about books, plus his off-blog e-mails to me. This is a great example of synergy between my blog and my ChessLectures! Perhaps I can collect enough good examples of amateur games in this way to provide the raw material for a book. But even if that doesn’t come to pass, a regular monthly lecture on listener-submitted games is one of those ideas that’s so obviously good that you wonder why no one ever did it before.
In the 1990s, I spent a couple years as Games Editor for the Ohio Chess Bulletin. It was a lot of work, and surprisingly it wasn’t all that easy to get good games for the publication. Some of the larger tournaments had boxes where players were supposed to turn in their scoresheets, and if the tournament directors were affiliated with the Ohio Chess Association they would often let me rummage through the box or just take it home at the end of the tournament. Of course, the scoresheets would often be hard to read, or would contain mistakes. And even if the score was kept impeccably, how was I supposed to know, out of a box of 100 scoresheets, which were the one or two best games? Generally I would just play through the games of the prizewinners and pick out one or two of them.
The magazine also asked for reader submissions, of course, but what came in was very sporadic and of uneven quality. It was hard to not print a reader submission after we had gone to the trouble of begging for submissions! So we’d print it all, good or bad.
I think that this ChessLecture series will be much more satisfying. Because I’m only lecturing on one game a month, everyone will understand there is some quality control. We’ll have a broader audience than the Ohio Chess Bulletin ever did, of course, and I hope the reward of a free month subscription will motivate more people to send in their best or most interesting games. We’ll see!
