Chat chat chat

On July 12 Garry Kasparov gave a live chat on Playchess.com. I served as moderator, question picker, and manic typist at Garry's hotel room. I'm glad I had the transcript because it was a fascinating discussion and I really didn't have a chance to pay much attention to it at the time!

It was hard to find good questions in the morass of chat coming in from the over 1500 people online. Challenges for a game, questions about his favorite eau de toilette, and those weren't the strangest of the lot!

Before publishing the whole thing at ChessBase.com here I edited the transcript down to the questions and answers and made additions and corrections based on the video we took. Some paraphrasing was necessary to keep up during the chat and a few times some good Kasparov comments didn't make it online during the chat.

If you want the raw feed of the chat as I saw it, here it is in a 124KB text file. Lucky for everyone else they could only see the questions and answers I sent. It was hard to find questions and comments in the mess, but it worked out pretty well in the end.

All of that on my trusty laptop on a 28.8 dial-up connection! Not exactly a dream scenario but it worked great. The Playchess.com Fritz 8 software worked just fine despite the low bandwidth.