Our First Chess Tournament Broadcast

At the King and Queens tournament on January 21, 2017 we broadcasted the scholastic master's section to chess24 with 6 players and one DGT e-board:

We were fortunate to have wifi internet access at the school. I was a little bit disappointed when I called Viera Charter school prior to the tournament to inquire about parents using the wifi on Saturday and was sternly told no. I'd settled on, but was worried about, using tethered internet through a cell phone. But Chris somehow hooked up with the VCS IT guy and he was present in the morning to help me and the tournament attendees connect.

Chess24 was amazingly helpful. Oliver (my Chess24 main contact) was apparently monitoring the tournament because he emailed me when an issue arose with the pairings. And later on, when one of the results was not showing up in the leaderboard, he quickly detected the problem and communicated with me to resolve it. I was very surprised with the one-on-one attention that Chess24 gave such a small, amateur production. Two hiccups in 15 games (5 rounds each with 3 games) is not too bad, but we'll need to improve if this is to scale up.

A goal we're considering for the next tournament is to track all the games, but we need to resolve the issue of how to section the players and how to transfer the pairings and results information from whatever software Chris uses to PGN format.

While this is the most advanced setup we've had for watching the games, we must remain pragmatic and ask how useful it was for players and parents. Several people watched the games from their mobile, either because they had kids playing or to check how much time is left in the round. But there wasn't a huge enthusiastic draw like their was with Matt's camera setup at the October Brouhaha.

I think the reason is the ease of accessibility. In October, you simply had to walk up to a large screen. With chess24, you an internet accessible device. You need to type the URL, find the tournament, find the round, and the game.

Matt and I are brainstorming what a good in-between would be. One really nice thing about his webcam setup is that it was on a LAN, so we operated independently of any internet access of a particular tournament venue. But the large TV is slightly inconvenient to move. And keeping a computer hooked up to it exposes it to damage or theft. A little mini projector? A raspberry pi connected to the TV? Who knows what we'll come up with!