I emailed their Support:

Quote:


So, there you go,

Cathexis

The unsuspecting part is not correct. L and others back in the day were buying generic VHS tapes, with a handwritten label, from a brown paper bag, at half price. If someone did similar today with digital disks, it would be just as obvious what is happening. Both sides of the transaction are wrong, but the entrepreneurial side is more wrong. Part of me thinks I was also wrong not to call the fraud squad on G, but I don't lose sleep over it.

I think they are all right if you like videos. I don't. I bought this set from chess4less some time ago, similarly marked down then. So if you miss this window of opportunity, you will get another chance later. You can look through the titles online. Since they list for about $20 individually, if there were five or six you were interested in then I would think the set is a bargain.

I never bought any individual titles, the price/value is not right for me. But I *think* the early ones on VHS came with a booklet and the later ones on DVD came with .pgn files. With the bundle you don't get any extras, only the .mp4 file. I can play them on an iPad so I guess other tablets will also work. Two of my disks were corrupted. One of them I repaired with dd, but the other one was hopeless. Chess4less sent me a replacement no questions asked. Customer service is something to think about when making a purchase.

Many years ago at the club there was an ethically challenged individual, G, who had a side "business" duplicating these VHS tapes and selling them for half price. One evening at the club he got into a dispute with one of his customers, L. L was buying the videos from G, and when done with them L was *giving* them to his friends. G was arguing quite loudly that L should stop doing that: "You're cutting into my business!" 

Another of G's schemes was sandbagging in club games so he could try to win big every year playing the U1400 section at the World Open. I think he did win $5,000.00 *one* year, but if you average that over all the years he played he did not come close to breaking even. G was probably about 1700 strength, and could have been 1800 with only a little effort. But winning money at the World Open is not easy, for many reasons. One of G's problems was that he didn't have enough practice at *winning* touch-and-go games against 1400-level opposition. He was used to losing them to keep his rating down.