One of my favourite lunchtime hobbies over the last one year has been watching chess videos. My favourite publishers in this regard are GM Daniel King and Mato Jelic. King is a far superior analyst and goes into more depth while analysing games, though Jelic has a far larger repertoire (King usually only analyses games the day they were played).
In some ways I might be biased towards Jelic because his analysis and focus are largely in line with my strengths back during my days as a competitive chess player. Deep opening analysis, attacking games, the occasional tactical flourish and so on. He has a particular fondness for the games of Mikhail Tal, showering praises on his (Tal’s) sometimes erratic and seemingly purposeless sacrifices.
Once you watch a few videos of Jelic, though, you realise that there is a formula to his commentary. At some point in the game, he announces that the game is in a “critical position” and asks the viewer to pause the video and guess the next move. And a few seconds of pause later, he proceeds to show the move and move on with the game.
While this is an interesting exercise the first few times around, after a few times I started seeing a pattern – Jelic has a penchant for attacking positions, and the moves following his “critical positions” are more often than not sacrifices. And once I figured this bit out, I started explicitly looking for sacrifices or tactical combination every time he asked me to pause, and that has made the exercise a lot less fun.
I’d mentioned on this blog a few weeks back about my problem with watching movies – in that I’m constantly trying to second-guess the rest of the movie based on the information provided thus far. And when a movie gets too predictable, it tends to lose my attention. And thinking about it, I think sometimes it’s about curation or editing that makes things too predictable.
To take an example, my wife and I have been watching Masterchef Australia this year (no spoilers, please!), and I remarked to her the other day that episodes have been too predictable – at the end of every contest, it seems rather easy to predict who might win or go down, and so there has been little element of surprise in the show.
My wife remarked that this was not due to the nature of the competition itself (which she said is as good as earlier editions), but due to the poor editing of the show – during each competition, there is a disproportional amount of time dedicated to showing the spectacularly good and spectacularly bad performances.
Consequently, just this information – on who the show’s editors have chosen to focus on for the particular episode – conveys a sufficient amount of information on each person’s performance, without even seeing what they’ve made! A more equitable distribution of footage across competitors, on the other hand, would do a better job of keeping the viewers guessing!
It is similar in the case of Jelic’s videos. There is a pattern to the game situation where he pauses, which biases the viewer in terms of guessing what the next move will be. In order to make the experience superior for his viewers, Jelic should mix it up a bit, occasionally showing slow Carlsen-like positions, and stopping games at positional “critical positions”, for example. That can make the pauses more interesting, and improve viewer experience!
What are other situations where bad editing effectively gives away the plot, and diminishes the experience?