How to start a training broadcast on Playchess.com

by ChessBase - 30/03/2020

In our third tutorial, focusing on our playchess.com virtual rooms, we see how to have an online training session with you as a chess coach. In our tutorial series, we already took a look at how to create a virtual room for your chess club. Furthermore, we had another tutorial about online tournaments in your virtual room. These offers are an excellent option to keep up with your chess activities.

Online training with Playchess.com

If you are a coach or chess trainer and have a student or more who are willing to learn chess with you, playchess.com offers a virtual training room to make it happen.

The basic idea is to use the playchess.com client as a chessboard, which the trainer and the trainee are using at the same time despite the fact that they might be several hundred or even thousands of kilometres (miles) apart from each other. On top of that we recommend using one of the many video chat software options, like Skype, to have a better coach - student connection and training session.

In this short tutorial, we describe what is necessary to start your training.

Requirements

Besides having a PC or windows based laptop, it is important to have a client to login to playchess.com. This can either be done with Fritz or with ChessBase or our free client.

Fritz and ChessBase have some comfortable options, like loading up entire games or game positions and studies from databases.

Account basics and ranks

If this is your very first time creating an account simply follow the guided steps, when starting the client, on how to fill in the necessary data like your name, the city you live in and your nickname.

We have different ranks on playchess.com which are composed of the playing time and player strength. With the playchess.com rank of a Knight, you can start to open a chess board for the coaching. Having achieved the rank of a Bishop you can start the more professional private training session.

Depending on the total playing time and Elo strength, this table shows your rank:

Rooms

We have implemented a coaching zone to open your training chess board on Playchess.com.

The default room to begin your coaching session would be the Training and Teaching room, which is located on the right side:

Opening a chess board

At the menu on the top, click on File → New – Broadcast

Alternatively, simply press Ctrl+B.

A new window will open where you can add all optional infos, including a title for your coaching session like “Training from Master to student”.

With the playchess.com rank of the Bishop, you can set the chess board to private. Now all you have to do, is to invite the student or students separately, which is described further below.

This is how your board looks like, when you have clicked on the OK button.

By clicking on File → Open → Database or by pressing the shortcut key F12, you can now load complete games, positions or studies into the chess board window. This is accomplished in two simple steps:

Firstly you select your database of choice.

Secondly you open the game, position or study from the database.

Similar to the ChessBase software, the game shows up with all the options for analyses.

Annotations and commentary are certainly available as well:

Inviting your students

Once the chess board has been established, switch back from the broadcast window to the main window, where you can see the players listed in the rooms. Now simply use the right mouse button to click on the user (nickname of the user) you want to invite and use the option → Invite to Private Broadcast