Ametanoitos wrote on 03/05/14 at 15:27:35:


I don't think it's any better or worse than other Najdorf products that have been published over the last few years e.g. King's Power Play Najdorf and Rafael Leitão's Najdorf dvd for ChessEmpire.

She only covers 6...Nbd7 against 6.Bg5 line, mentions 7...Qb6 in passing but doesn't analyse it.

edit in:

A bit unfair on King, his is the best of the 3 imo.

gramsci wrote on 03/05/14 at 09:12:30:

Do you get the video for download or the access to watch it online (and if that - watch it as often as you like or once?)?
greetings, Matemax

I've bought Guramishvili's Najdorf and it's wonderfu. I'm thinking of buying a premium subscription but i'm no sure. Btw, the Svidler's lessons on the Grunfeld cost 29.99 Euros, so it's not a bargian.

LostTactic wrote on 02/25/14 at 23:49:00:


Haven't seen that tactics trainer bug (sounds quite funny/annoying), so maybe they fixed it already.

Svidler's series is especially impressive since he's still playing in the Candidates next month!

The "School" seems to work fine now, though obviously aimed at total beginners. Having Anand is kind of a novelty, though.

You're right there, hicetnunc! He once spent 20 minutes chatting with me on ICC about a move in a tournament he wasn't even playing! While I was deeply flattered, I got the impression I wasn't the only one to have been treated to his brilliance. And yes, he was absolutely brilliant!

When I clicked to buy membership there was only the option to pay 99euro for 1 years membership. I think you can buy the videos individually though. For example Svidler's Grunfeld repertoire videos was 14.99euros, bargain for 12hrs 30mins by arguably the world's best practitioner of the opening.

They've been marketing it aggressively on various social media recently (past month at least), particularly twitter.

I decided to buy premium for access to all their video content. Very impressed so far, the general length of a series is 2-4hrs. Svidler's Gruenfeld repertoire is an anomaly at 12hrs and 30mins. I have watched the first 2hrs of Svidler's series and it has been very high quality. I have also watched; the Capablanca series by Kasimdzhanov with guest hosts Vallejo Pons and Gustafsson, Anand's series on common openings, Sadler's best games (half way through) and I just started watching this series that became available today by Gustafsson and Yusupov about Carlsen. Everything I have watched so far has been entertaining and instructional.

In terms of non-video stuff I have encountered some problems with their tactics trainer program and the academy course is buggy/glitchy. On tactics trainer the computer would sometimes make a move that checkmates you, then it would be your turn to move. Obviously it's not possible to move when you're in checkmate and you lost tactics trainer rating pts when the timer ran out. I also had a problem in their academy course, I started the section on the Rook and on one of the pgs only part of board was showing, making it impossible to progress to the next stage. I haven't tried tactics trainer today so I don't know if it has been fixed, but the Rook section in the academy course has been fixed.

I have only played a few games on the site (blitz), the board and interface is nice. However the waiting time is frustrating, I'm going to stick to other sites until they increase their playing member-base.

There's a live tournaments section that has the games from the recent elite lvl tournament in, most recent being Zurich. I assume there will be live commentary broadcasts of future events, I guess that's why they signed Lawrence Trent but will have to wait and see.

Overall I would say for chess video content it is now the best site on the web for chess. I am also a diamond member of chess.com and like their video content as well, but chess24 are seriously raising the bar with their content. I will be keep an eye on how frequent new videos are released on chess24, as on chess.com it's pretty much daily and I'm not sure if chess24 will be able to match that. For playing chess they don't have a big enough member-base yet. In terms of training tools if they can work out the bugs it looks like it will be no worse than chess.com's tools. As someone with an interest in business I will be interested to see how chess.com react to chess24's launch, as there is no doubt from watching the promotional videos for chess24 they're targeting the "mass market" of chess players which is chess.com's main audience. I think it's good news for chess enthusiasts as increased competition should force all these chess sites to raise their standards and provide more value for money.