I share the same opinion as Garvin and I also watched the last hour live after I woke up too early.wgarvin wrote:Just as a counterpoint.. I watched games 2 and 3 live, but I'm not a Go player, and I found his commentary very interesting and useful to be able to even vaguely follow what was going on in the game. I don't think his predictions were as off as you imply--it seemed to me that he called the right move at least half of the time. There were a bunch of times when he predicted the right move immediately, and then spent 1-2 minutes discussing some variation he thought might be interesting, even if it didn't involve that move (e.g. to explain to the audience why an alternate move would be bad and thus unlikely to be played). I'd also say the analysis wasn't "irrelevant" even if the game had moved on beyond that point already (which we could see for ourselves on the stream anyway). He was speaking mostly to an audience of amateur players and non-players, so playing out variations was useful to show us why his instinctive reactions were mostly justified. As a viewer I think that cutting him short mid-sentence to restart on the next position, and then likely cut that one short too, would not have been better.towforce wrote:I awoke early, so I watched most of game 3. I found Michael Redmond's commentary annoying today.
I may be overestimating, but today it seemed as though about 3/4 of the time he was guessing the next player's move wrongly, and then doing variations from a position that the viewer could see was never going to arise because the player had already chosen a different move. Often the move after had already been done, making the analysis even more irrelevant.
At one point, they even had the analysis board position wrong because they had missed a move - and it took them several minutes to discover this.
They need an extra team member to give them a buzz when a move has been made, and a different kind of buzz when the move is different to the one expected.
Having said that, I do appreciate the value of having a 9-dan English speaking commentator, and I do understand that high level board game players do tend to analyse by doing variations.
Since Lee Sedol was in time pressure for a while in the 2nd half of both games 2 and 3, he always moved within 60 seconds and sometimes much less. On several occasions, it was obvious that Chris Garlock had glanced at the actual game position and knew that a move or two had already happened, but did not want to interrupt Michael in the middle of his analysis of how some variation might play out, and I think I preferred that. Sometimes Michael obviously knew a move had happened too, but wanted to finish his explanation before returning to the game position.
Anyway, it was amazing to watch a match of such a high skill level, and without Michael Redmond's commentary it would have been completely inaccessible to me, so I appreciated it quite a lot. :D
It seems to me evaluation of certain territority cannot be resolved statically or seems to be quite vague until a certain stage.
E.g. it was not clear if White really could maintain the big region on the lower board beneath Blacks little left edge. At least I hoped Sedol could
shrink it with some invasion, but the commentator was sceptical from the beginning and he was right!
Thus it seems something must have gone wrong already in the early middlegame which I did not follow.
The first guess of a counting I saw was a shocking 60:40(very rough count) from the commentator which he at first couldn't believe himself.
I really love to see Go gaining again some media echo in the western hemisphere, IIRC we had some Go 'hype' in the late 80ies/early 90ies
when we had a lot of Go players also in my region, but may be it was just a local phenomenon.
At the time of 1986 I also started with Go and played it quite often but it was impossible for me to play chess and Go at the same time
and reach a level which made me happy. I decided for chess then.
Still it is very appealing to me and aesthetically I know nothing better. (Sound of good stones - the thick board - the feeling of good stones etc.)