"The membership fee is extremely reasonable, considering that it gives you a year's unlimited playing time... plus access to lectures, interviews and coverage of major events." — Sarah Hurst, Chess on the Web
(Policy on broadcasting from web pages is at the end).
There are two basic steps to broadcasting a game on ICC:
1) Create a 0-move library game with the correct player names.
2) Examine the library game, and enter moves as they occur.
Make sshout announcements during the game to attract observers.
You can also update the clocks if you like, kibitz any
information you may have (especially if you're in the
playing hall), and set the result when the game is over.
You could do this in one step, actually, creating a game
and setting the names and so forth, and then entering moves.
But if someone with an old interface starts observing while
you're changing the names, their screen might have the wrong
names even after you change them.
These two steps are described in more detail:
1) Creating the library game
First you create an examined game, either with the "examine"
command or by matching yourself. You should then set the
time control with the settimecontrol command, and set the
names with the setwhitename and setblackname commands.
(Alternatively, you can use "tag White <name>" and
"tag Black <name>"). You can also enter other information
about the event using the "tag", command, although it
will probalby only show up in the PGN file. Then you can
save the game to your library with the "libkeepexam" command.
Here's an example:
set wild 0
examine
settimecontrol 120 0
setwhitename Kasparov,G
setblackname Anand,V
tag Event Ultimate World Championship
tag Round 1
libkeepexam
Make note of where in your library the game was saved, because
you'll need that for step 2. Let's say it is slot %1 in your
library.
Do "liblist" and see if the game listing looks okay. If not,
you can do "libdelete %1", modify the game information, and
do "libkeepexam" again. When you are done, do "unexamine" to
stop examining the game.
You are now done with Step 1, and you are ready to broadcast the game.
You can do Step 1 anytime before the broadcast, the sooner the better.
Sometimes you might know the pairings but not the color assignments,
so you might need to prepare two games.
2) Doing the live broadcast
To begin the broadcast, you examine the library game:
examine %1
Now you are ready to enter the moves with your mouse, for both sides.
You can also type in the moves, one per line, and hit "enter". If you
make a mistake on a move, do "back". You can go back as many times as
you want. If you want to go back 5 half-moves, do "back 5".
When the game is over, you can set the result. This is described in
help result. You should do this before saving the completed game
to the library.
Safety for disconnections
If you get disconnected, the game and all the moves will be lost! So to
be safe, ask one of the observers if they would mind being an "examiner"
of the game. They should not make any moves, but having them be an
examiner will keep the game up on ICC if you get disconnected. To
make Joe, who is observing your game, an examiner, do:
mexamine Joe
If you get disconnected: log back in, observe the game, and ask Joe to
"mexamine" you. Then you can resume entering moves. If Zek is around
you can ask him to start up a "mexer" robot which will serve as your backup
examiner.
Setting the clocks
If you want to adjust the clocks on ICC because they do not match the real
clocks, you can do:
setwhiteclock 01:20:15
if White has one hour, 20 minutes, and 15 seconds on his clock. The same
works for the "setblackclock" command. "1:02" means one minute and 2 seconds.
If you set the clock that is ticking, some interfaces won't display the
correct time.
Getting more people to watch
While you are broadcasting, it's a good idea to s-shout announcements so
you will get more observers. For example:
sshout "observe Fred" to watch the finals of the Brazilian championship live!
You can use the new "result" command to set the result of the
game when it is over. See help result.
At the end of the game, if you want to save it to your library, do
"libkeepexam".
That's all there is to broadcasting games on ICC! You can broadcast only
one game at a time from one ICC login, but you can open another login
with a different username in Blitzin and broadcast a game from the second
login also, using only one computer and one Blitzin.
If you have questions, contact "Zek" on ICC or send email to
him at zek@chessclub.com
ICC's stand on broadcasting tournament games:
* Chess moves, even live moves, cannot be copyrighted. What ICC is
doing is perfectly legal. We never transmit copyrightable material,
such as pictures and commentary.
* We always recognize the official sponsor of the tournament (and
include a URL of that sponsor).
* We always display the URL of the official site of the games.
HELP Top
ICC Help: broadcast