Agadmator - The YouTube Chess King

 I first had to deal with a young enterprising man called Antonio Radić when I began working with Chess photographers on a photo gallery for sale, licensing, and distribution of chess photos on a now-defunct chess website called Chesshot. He had heard of my ambitious project and began asking me to provide him with photos of all current top grandmasters in the world!


Agadmator (Antonio Radić) was a charming and driven young man and he got his photos for a reasonable price and all the earnings went to the photographer, as my Chesshot project was a non-profit effort. I'd like to think that the service I provided Agadmator helped him to then later become the world's greatest chess YouTube star but chances are there were many other things that he did that made this achievement possible. He is probably the best social media content creator in the chess world today, and I thought I was chess hot also, but my work is on tool making and feature innovation not pure content creation like Agadmator, who is on a league of his own. He exceeds super grandmaster like Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakumura, and other super-strong titled players because he knows how to make chess seem simple, it both his strength and some say his weakness. Ordinary fans love him because when you watch his shows you feel stronger afterwards than when you started watching it, but for no particular reason, I could discern. 


Okay, let us give Agadmator his credit he has made Chess awesome. If you ever listen to his YouTube show you will be infected by his massive love for the game. It almost doesn't matter how he comes up with analysis, Stockfish assisted or not, he is honest about what he is doing. I even had the pleasure of being the subject of one of his Youtube shows. He had heard of one of my innovative ideas called Chess Time Machine

Bobby Fischer vs Garry Kasparov - Chess Time Machine



He took the most ridiculous and eyecatching game that my idea had produced and presented it to his fans who duly tore it apart and ridiculed it. At the time I wondered why Agadmator had done this because I'd explained to him that the Chess Time Machine was not claiming to have made an actual game between both players but a statistically less unlikely one than me just making moves up. One of the criticisms from his fans was Kasparov would never play this weak, and presumably blunder a loss to Fischer. I found myself thinking how weak any player's game is when they blunder in one move, does it matter that it is Kasparov or a 1200 elo patzer, a blunder is a blunder isn't it? The Agadmator fans were generally unhappy with the level of play like it was two amateurs playing, however, some of his fans did say they thought the Fischer moves seemed legit. To that, I'd say the same after the opening moves they are no more Fischer's moves than Kasparov moves were his, a strong engine was playing the end positions of known positions both played and played out with a 3500+ engine on both sides. Well, I've seen a lot of Super Grandmaster chess games that I would not have thought were up to 2000 elo standard as they were so littered with blunders and inaccuracies but be that as it may. I was roasted by Agadmator's fans.


It got me thinking what that young man's true motivation was, Antonio Radić was clearly talented and didn't need to piss all over my ideas and laugh at me to become a massive hit yet he did. It seems to be the very nature of the social chess experience that you have to be either a massive sycophant of a chess personality or supercritical of someone else in chess to get mass appeal. 


The cult of personality is strong in the reason for Agadmator's success and I wish him luck with his project. I only wish he would be careful that he crushes the dreams of other talented chess innovators and chess personalities on his way to the top as he meets them on his way down. Streaming chess and Youtube chess is here to stay but who will be the new King or Queen of Chess Youtube who knows but regardless long may King Agadmator reign as he has brought more joy and fun than anything I've seen or probably will ever see on Chess YouTube.

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