We now live in a golden age of chess content, where you can find an endless supply of YouTube videos touching on everything chess. That's likely why Josh's 12 videos on the ancient Chessmaster 8000 slipped my mind. Nonetheless, these remain some of the best videos ever recorded, and they showed me what high-level chess, and a high-level chess thought process, was for the first time.
It literally changed my life.
Before finding Josh's videos, I had chess books and that's about it. My grandfather taught me chess, but we rarely talked about it. Played a lot, yes, talked about it, no. Chess books helped, but it took a long time to get comfortable with chess notation (let alone the cumbersome descriptive notation I frequently encountered). Josh's videos, therefore, opened up a new world: high-quality chess in an easily-accessed format. It found me at the perfect time.
Josh covered all the bases: strategy, tactics, openings, etc. He also went further. Josh told stories, of how the weather or tournament conditions or sleeping-in affected how the game unfolds. Josh went beyond the board and focused on psychology, on how keeping the tension induces mistakes and how prophylaxis tends to make your opponent lash out. Josh waxed poetically about being and nothingness, beauty and defeat. Together, this created something unique, chess content that went beyond chess. I couldn't stop watching.
His lessons ingrained themselves deep. In his first lesson, he exploited a pin in a way I had never seen before; I've since won countless games using the exact same idea. I've completely internalized it.
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| Taken straight from my opening's course! |
In his second and third lessons, he showed the Exchange French with c4, an opening I have since copied (with considerable success) my entire life. Indeed, I've used all of Josh's openings at different times, though only the French has stuck completely.
In his sixth and seventh lessons,
he explored doubled-pawns, showing when they are strong and when they
are weak. I have won several games precisely because I was willing to
take on this perceived weakness, and these rank among my proudest
victories.
His crowning achievement, though, is his game against Zlotnikov, a 50min tour-de-force on the power of domination. Josh sacrifices two exchanges to reduce White to complete passivity, and then he slowly turns the screws. White spends half the game trying desperately to sacrifice the exchange back to relieve the pressure, and Josh keeps preventing the counter-sacrifice.
To this day, the theme of domination, of completely enveloping your opponent's army and preventing all counterplay, guides my thinking. Nothing makes me happier. A Queen sacrifice is pretty, sure, but domination is heaven.
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| Taken from my favourite game I've played. Whit is helpless. Black is dominating. |
Indeed, Josh likely influenced most of my life. His talk of philosophy pushed me into majoring in philosophy at university. His passion and depth for chess convinced me that this was a game worth taking seriously. My own YouTube videos show obvious influences from Josh's own. I even became a blackbelt in karate, mirroring Josh's own martial arts journey.
I am basically Josh Waitzkin ... in a much weaker, beta form.
Jokes aside, Josh Waitzkin produced some amazing chess videos for Chessmaster, videos that have somehow slipped from the chess community's consciousness. They have no special effects, no memes, just a guy and a board and a whole lot of instruction. They remain absolutely outstanding and rival anything produced in the last decade.
The entire Chessmaster set is available free on YouTube. I'd suggest starting on video 61 in that list: that is the first of the Chessmaster videos I had access to. I'm sure the entire set is great, but I've only watched those last dozen... but I've watched them over and over and over again. Highly recommended, so much so that Josh's videos stand as my first recommendation for free content. I promise not to forget about him again.
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