I know this thread is about silly low tech methods, but I have another alternative.
Give the kid a digital camera. After each move he snaps a picture of the board.
Type A dads can then flip thru the pictures after the game and input to fritz etc.
Grant Perks
Columbus, Ohio
Yeah, I like it.
Even better would be to give the kid a remote control for the camera and put the camera on a tripod so that the picture is always framed exactly the same way. Then you put the pictures in chronological order with the first picture on top and the rest chronologically descending.
Then when you flip through the pictures quickly it will be a movie!!!
Actually it would be neat to see 198 tripods with cameras in a room with 200 players… my kid would be the board without the cameras…
And of course the kids will all be under the age of 7 so there would certainly be no problem of them bumping into the tripods or anything with their typewriters…
No, this wouldn’t work. If they use digital cameras, somebody might save a series of positions in the camera and the kid might play back them back for opening advice!
Now some art training, charcoal, and a sketch pad – that MIGHT be acceptable!
As the sole proud type A dad on this forum, I’m jealous I didn’t think of the camera thing first. But then I jumped straight to video camera and began hearing “Invasion of privacy”, “Liability issues”…Gee, I guess all of those soccer moms out filming their kids playing soccer should be rounded up too. Videotaping a chess tournament isn’t exactly like zooming in on a 12 year old girl at a swim meet.
Kudos to the camera idea guy, way to think outside the box!
Hey, I was just trying to circle this thread back to the video camera as a means of recording the game. Guess it worked.
Now with regards to Type A dads, you are pretty bad but I have seen worse. I will tell you next weekend at the tournament about the Type A mom I ran into a few years ago. You are mild compared to her.
The organizer could have one director just to record the moves for each board. That would be 100 directors for 100 boards … that would cost a lot of money and how you get 100 directors at one tournament.
If the USCF wants to have it that way, want a first class airline ticket. Want a hotel room for the whole tournament plus exspences. Sure, going to have steak and lobster. Also the cost to rent a car, hey the airport and the hotel are not close. Will record all the moves, that is a sweet deal.
The soccer mom videotaping the game is probably 100 feet or more away from the action, off the playing field, and is not interfering with the competition in any way.
To coin a phrase, the camera is outside the box.
if you want to videotape a chess game from 100 feet away, that’s fine with me, as long as you don’t block the door or aisles or intefere with the competition. Soccer moms cannot be on the playing field, even though it might be a much better camera angle, and parents aren’t allowed to plant themselves (or their cameras) next to their kids at major chess events, either.
One chess parent came up with a special scorebook which had a grid where the child would circle the piece, and the square cordinate. I think each move box looked something like this:
R N B K Q P
a b c d e f g h
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
So for the move Nf3 the player would circle the N, f, and 3. It looked a cumbersome, but I guess for young kids it might be easier then writing.
Over the weekend just for fun I printed out similiar type scoresheets and tried this system with a friend.
It wasn’t as elegant as I had envisioned it. I even had oo ooo ep for the special moves. I should also have had a x and + It was also hard to indicate where you needed the to and from square. The biggest problem was simply locating the move you were on. In a regular score sheet the blank unfilled moves make it easy to see what move you are on. A seperate piece of blank paper to hide the uncircled scores would help. But all in all it was a pretty cumbersome way of keeping score.
The way this score sheet was set up there was one of those grids per move, and they were all numbered. The only time you’d need the originating square is if the move is ambigious such as Nd2. Was the knight on f3 or the one on b1? As I said it looked too much like work to me.
Mike, that was my sad attempt at humor…