ON CHESS
Fans ate up chance to guess moves
Saturday, November 28, 2009 3:08 AM
By SHELBY LYMAN
The 1972 Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky championship match not only electrified the nation but also attracted a record public-TV audience.
It helped that Bobby vs. Boris had an iconic human quality in a world beset by Cold War tensions. But the unusual nature of chess was also onstage.
When move-by-move coverage was suspended to follow instead the nomination of Sargent Shriver as the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate, thousands of calls — many angry — flooded the switchboard of Channel 13 in New York.
Self-preservation dictated that the station immediately go back to chess. And it did.
The presentation of the games allowed for a direct participation not found in major sporting events. Viewers were actively thinking and analyzing — becoming, avatarlike, either Fischer or Spassky.
At times, the host would go off-camera while the audience did its own analysis. Thousands thought they might be able to find as good a move, if not better, than Fischer or Spassky.
The sense of empowerment, for some, apparently was exhilarating.
The 1997 match between Garry Kasparov and the computer Deep Blue offered a similar telecast opportunity, but IBM refused to support it.
Source: Columbus Dispatch
Fischer is the best ever.
The Kasparov-Deep Blue web transmission was for many the first-ever chess game/match that they followed online. The transmission had real-time commentary if I remember correctly. The author of the article is right that under the proper circumstances the audience may feel much more involved in what it’s watching in such a case. Organizers should consider that when they talk about the possibility of showing chess on TV. There is a tendency to talk only about rapid chess in conjunction with possible TV transmission. That may be convenient for TV producers, but maybe too fast for viewers to be actively engaged in watching the game (and when I say actively I mean by analyzing). The average viewer is a patzer, so he will never be interested in something he can not understand. On the other hand, a longer game with commentary and analysis etc could be much more instructive for a TV audience I think. Time is not an issue when you have a billion TV channels around, and in any case, it doesn’t have to be fully broadcasted, a channel can connect live to the chess event for several minutes and discuss what happened the last few moves, and then go back to normal schedule, then back to the chess event, etc. Of course, in order for this to have ANY success, one must start with the best of the best, i.e. the next World Championship Match.