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.
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.
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.