Chess videos seem to be all the rage these days. Since years chess fans are able to buy DVDs showing their favorite grandmasters explaining chess moves. However, until recently making chess videos has been restricted to the professionals who can afford the technology needed to produce the videos. But end of last year Patrick from Chess For Blood (now unfortunately retired from blogging) published a homemade video and started a new trend of amateur chess players producing their own chess videos. Now Josh Specht and the folks at Chess-Videos.com take this approach even further and designed a site that makes it easy for any chess players to make chess videos and publish them on the Internet.

Although the site is still at the beginning of its existence it is already offering a lot. In addition to the almost mandatory discussion forums it provides free tools and instructions for producing and publishing chess videos. Making a video is an experience by itself (although I did not try it myself yet) but would be only half the fun without an audience. And the forums at Chess-Videos.com give chess players the opportunity to discuss their games. A nice feature on the side is the tool to generate and publish chess diagrams. It allows to integrate diagrams into forum and blog posts and is not restricted to use at the Chess-Videos.com site.

The most important question is of course how helpful producing your own chess videos is for becoming a better chess player. I didn't have the time to try it myself (yet) but I certainly learnt something from watching a few games at Chess-Videos.com while listening to the audio annotation. Some people simply learn better from an audio-visual presentation than from books while others prefer the good old-fashioned book approach. However, making a chess video requires to put a lot of thought into the game and this will probably lead to long-term improvement. But take a look for yourself and give it a try!

Read more about chess video sites on the Internet:
Chess videos on the Internet - part II
Chess videos on the Internet - part III
Chess videos on the Internet - part IV

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