Sunday, January 11, 2015

Pushing Wood - Chess Documentary by Jeffrey Plunkett on Maurice Ashley and Millionaire Chess

Film Maker Jeffrey Plunkett recently started a crowdfunding campaign in IndieGoGo named Pushing Wood - https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pushing-wood-a-documentary

The goal of the campaign is to raise $50,000 to fund making of a chess documentary on GM Maurice Ashley, Millionaire Chess and some insights into Professional Chess. The campaign will last until end of January and has raised more than $4,000 as of this writing. You can check out the impressive staffs, the perks and the other details in the campaign page. I read 2 good reviews on this project in the Chessbase article and NM Dana Mackenzie's blog post apart from many facebook comments. USCF recently published an interview of the film maker here - http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12924/796/

My favorite part from the promotional video is GM Timur Gareev's quote -

The only goals that are worth accomplishing are the unreasonable ones. Millionaire Chess is an unreasonable idea... and its just happening right now... hahaha...

One thing I noticed is that the funding type for this project is Fleixble Funding which IndieGoGo describes as - This campaign will receive all funds raised even if it does not reach its goal. So I am very hopeful that the documentary will eventually come out, no matter what. The current delivery date is December 2015. Millionaire Chess #2 will happen in October 2015 in Las Vegas, so I assume Plunkett will be able to include few things from that event too in the documentary.

We, the chess players, should support this initiative.

Footnote: This month's Chess Life Cover Article is on Millionaire Chess #1 by GM Daniel Naroditsky.