Program to delay broadcast of live games (Beta release)

Running Chess Tournaments
1

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the broadcasting of live games in that it can facilitate cheating. To deal with this, I’ve written a program that I am now releasing that will delay the live broadcast of games by a user-selected number of moves. I’ve had a routine that delayed the broadcast by a set number of minutes, but I believe that using a set number of moves is much better. The program edits the PGN file before sending it to the web host to remove the last N number of moves. Once a game finishes, it will send all the remaining moves up.

This is meant to run in parallel with DGT’s LiveChess program, but not using the DGT software to do the upload. I’ve tested it at several tournaments and will be using it at three tournaments in the next couple of months.

A first draft user manual is included in the zip file, and I’d be interested in any feedback about either the app or the documentation.

When I get all the parts better organized, I will place the source on Github under an MIT open source license. I should be able to get it done in the next week or two.

Let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Mike Regan
Page with link to download is:
http://mdchess.com/index.php?option=com_phocadownload&view=category&id=2:software&Itemid=790

2

Mike,

Thanks for doing this!

Do you think it would be possible to let the organizer/user decide if the delay should be X minutes or X moves? I can think of arguments for doing either way, so why not give me the choice? :slight_smile:

Thanks again,
-Matt Phelps

3

Matt,
I have a older version of the program that did delay the broadcast by a set number of minutes. When I wrote the new one I didn’t see any advantages in the time based delay. Since the effective delay can be anywhere from 0 moves (if someone is in a long think) to over 15 (if players are in opening theory) the net effect is very random.
I could release the time-based one but I would like to figure out the use case. What did you have in mind?
Mike

4

Several years ago, Frederic Friedel of ChessBase.com sent to me a draft paper he was about to submit to FIDE asking for something very similar to this — a policy of having a 15 minute delay.

If you have this working, Frederic might be interested to hear about it.