Garry Kasparov launches a community-first chess platform

A bit off topic but I found MasterClass classes to lack depth. Most of what I watched (mainly cooking related) seemed more like entertainment vs actually learning anything.

Chess is the poster boy of the Lindy effect.

lichess has very big problems with the chat, so I won't call it "community first", it's nice if you are just there to play chess, but playing chess with your actual friends its a problem, the chat is heavily censured so having any casual conversation while playing it's hard. To give some examples they ban chat messages that look "similar" to the previous one, so lets say you type a2, and then you type a3 (... a chess position) the last message won't be displayed which is very annoying. This "solution" solves nothing and causes problems, because anyone trying to say something will just try till the message goes through(if you ever noticed that what you typed didnt reach the chat...). Did you make a typo on your phone number/birthdate/address? you can't fix it if it's just the fix to the number, they seem to have been trying to solve with the computer social issues that cant really be solved that way. Besides, there's a very lengthy list of censured words that you can't type, even if you are playing with your actual friends, with people that you may even know in real life, it's insane. I maintain sites frequented by teens and their language is not the best but thats the way teens talk, lichess doesn't welcome the young by doing what its doing now. They are dictating what you can say and not. The funny thing is that I believe the chat is logged forever on their server and there's no indication on the screen of that actually happening, I really wish for my chat history to be deleted, specially because I was not informed about it. Don't get me wrong, I love lichess, but I have pretty much stopped playing when I discovered these things.

Pohchamps was in the making since 2018.

There was a kasparovchess.com before: Mig Greengard's wikipedia says he "was vice president of content for Kasparov Chess Online and editor-in-chief of kasparovchess.com from 1999 until the site's demise in 2002." Greengard has been Kasparov's PA/confidante for a long time. Before 2011 he also had the best chess blog, the Daily Dirt.[0]

I wanted to share a fascinating insight into Kasparov that Mig wrote to Edward Winter in April 2005:

"A few words regarding your interesting note about Garry Kasparov and his retirement. While I don’t disagree with the content of your item, Garry has always been demonstrably impetuous and I’m a little surprised you give much credit to an entourage of Iagos and people trying to make a buck off of him. They may exist, to a degree, but he makes his own decisions, often with what I consider too little external input. That, and his mother is still very much the only real member the inner circle, or at least the “inner inner” circle.

In the brief time I have been close to him, most of his big decisions, dubious and otherwise, were made quickly and on his own. (Obviously the degree of his mother’s influence is unknown to me.) His sudden decision to dive into politics last year with the Committee 2008 Free Choice was against the advice of just about everyone. This was also true with his retirement. In both cases it was more after the fact concern than pre-announcement advice. Certainly in my case, as a selfish chess fan, I would much prefer he played chess until, at least, his best isn’t good enough. I’ve encouraged him to stay involved in the chess world by writing a column or training young players, and I expect he will eventually return to the board.

You can make a case that his combative, contrarian nature tends to lead him against the advice of friends and public opinion because he enjoys trying to prove people wrong. (I believe this largely explains his interest in the New Chronology.) If you are looking for a tidy reason why Garry has made bad decisions, I’d say it’s simply because he makes them very quickly. He doesn’t like dragging things out (what I would call contemplation) and he is very confident of the correctness of his decisions. This is essential in chess, but often a recipe for disaster in other areas, at least if you’re not as good at them as Kasparov is at chess.

This may be too prosaic, but it’s also Occam’s Razor. Since he has demonstrably improved in this area in the past five or six years (Predecessors Vol. 1 notwithstanding), I can’t imagine he was anything but worse ten or 15 years ago. It was all about action, making something happen, shocking the critics. He’s very sure of himself in just about everything and rarely seeks advice or tells people what he’s going to do.

Regarding his decline in public opinion, I think here too the answers are fairly simple. I concur with your specific examples, but the real basis is that people root for underdogs, not the favorite. When Kasparov was an outsider it was much different from when he became the status quo. Who doesn’t like a young rebel? Having power is very different from shouting at the gates. When you actually try to do something you are going to make enemies. And again he went about many of these things too much on his own, convinced he was 100% right and unwilling to compromise."

[0] Mig got me into seriously following and studying chess in about 2007-8, with his hilarious audio tournament broadcasts on ICC's ChessFM . There'd be him being extremely funny, teamed with a serious GM, usually strongly accented, like Yermolinsky or Har-Zvi. It was great. I'd listen to that while following tournaments live on FICS, and taking part in discussion about each game on there (no computer lines allowed), which were wonderful. That was a great community. The tv-style streamed youtube videos of today from Chess24 or St Louis, featuring strong GM commentators, live video of the players, player post-mortems, are amazing, but still maybe not as instructional and enjoyable as those days.

The ancient history: the ICS (Internet Chess Server) began in 1992, and started charging $ in 1995, becoming the ICC (Internet Chess Club). FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) split off then, led by people who wanted to keep it non-commercial.

[1] https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/kasparov2.html