New ChessBase service: all live tournaments at a glance!

by Frederic Friedel
1/14/2017 – As you know the Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2017, with Carlsen, Aronian, So, Karjakin, Giri, etc., is starting this weekend. So you will spend the next two weeks logging into Playchess and following the activites of these top players. Or you will watch some or the other high-class events that are taking place. This you will do using a Playchess Client or a ChessBase Account broadcast. Now there is a different and even mor convenient way. Take a look.

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Playchess Live coverage – all live tournaments at a glance!

Do you know which tournaments are on at the moment? Do you know which GMs or super GMs are playing? You can now find all this information in one place! A list of all the tournaments currently being broadcast on the playchess.com server, from Antarctica to Zanzibar, is available at live.playchess.com!

But first let us remember how you did this until now. If you wanted to watch live games – a specific tournament or just to check what was currently happening – you would start your Fritz or ChessBase, and log into Playchess, perhaps using the dedicated Playchess client. This is what you get at login:

Once you are online on the server you go to the Broadcast room:

There you find a list of all tournaments being currently broadcast:

Not too much on an early Saturday morning, but maybe you are interested in the Parsvnath Delhi Open, which is currently under way (India is 4½ hours ahead of Europe). You locate it in the list and see a list of games below, where you can select one to watch. All fairly straighforward, but involving multiple steps.

Watching live games on Playchess from your browser

Now we have a new service that gives you access to Playchess, with a neat overview of what is currently being broadcast, directly in your browser. Just click live.playchess.com – and bookmark this page for future use.

This one-click access in your browser, on your notebook, tablet or even your smartphone, produces an instant overview of the tournaments that are currently being broadcast – and others where the round has ended but the games are still available in the Playchess broadcast room. So you click on the tournament you want to watch, and that takes you to the live board.

There you can select a game from the list below the board and watch it, using all the advanced facilities that our latest JavaScript player provides. Hovering with the mouse over an icon explains the function. Here is a brief overview:

You can move pieces on the replay board to analyse, and in fact start an engine (fan button in the middle) to help you. You can maximize the replayer, auto-play, flip the board and even change the piece style in the bar below the board. At the bottom of the notation window on the right there are buttons for editing (delete, promote, cut lines, unannotate, undo, redo) save, play out the position against Fritz and even embed our JavaScript replayer on your web site or blog.

As you know the Tata Steel Chess Tournament 2017, with Carlsen, Aronian, So, Karjakin, Giri, etc., is starting this weekend, so it is the ideal way for you to test our new broadcast service. There are two invitational groups with 14 players in each, plus a giant Amateur Open.

We wish you a lot of enjoyment in two weeks of surely very exciting chess.

Editor-in-Chief emeritus of the ChessBase News page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.

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crazypawn crazypawn 1/18/2017 09:22
ChessBase will collapse soon with this limited features
chronograph chronograph 1/14/2017 09:54
Have a look at the chess24 smartphone-app. That's how to do it. I don't understand why it takes a big company like Chessbase so long to build something that gives a full overview of a tournament. The 'new' feature described above is just another limited gameviewer. No games of previous rounds, no tournament standings. It's tempting to build features like saving games, adding comments, engine etc. and to forget the most important ones. Don't get me wrong, I use Chessbase products a lot (Playchess-client, Chessbase account) because I appreciate them.
aryan7 aryan7 1/14/2017 07:05
Aljeandro Ramirez must write and commentate and I liked this feature.
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