Video editor for chess channels
Nine chess channels, more than 500 clips cut out of one podcast archive, and two spec edits the channels published themselves. Chess is the hardest niche in short form to clip well, and that is the whole reason I am good at it.
A chess moment means nothing until you understand the position
In most niches the good moment is legible the second it arrives. Someone falls over, someone says something outrageous. You need no briefing to know it landed.
Chess is the opposite. The best moment is a move, and a move is meaningless until you understand the position it was played in. That takes eight to fifteen seconds. Short form gives you three. So the honest edit spends its whole attention budget on setup and loses the viewer before the payoff, and the dishonest edit is just noise.
The answer that worked across all nine channels is to open on the reaction rather than the move. A person reacting is understood instantly by someone who has never played a game. The viewer arrives already knowing something remarkable happened, which buys back the explanation that used to sit at the front and cost everything. The full method is written up here.
The nine channels
Seven were client work. On two more I sent an edit nobody asked for and the channel published it.
Seven channels
Eric Rosen, Perpetual Chess Podcast, ChessDojo, Anna-Maja Kazarian, Gauri Chess, ASMR Chess and Alessia Santeramo. Streams, podcasts, teaching channels and long-form production work.
GMHikaru and agadmator
Two of the largest channels in chess published an edit I sent unsolicited. The GMHikaru clip has done around 120K views. No contract before it, and none after.
Knowing which moment is worth it
The craft transfers between niches. The instinct for which position is worth explaining at all does not. That part only comes from watching a lot of one thing.
Real channels, real numbers
Each one is written up in full, including what did not work.
Fixed prices, no proposals
Buy one clip before you commit to anything. Standard delivery is within 48 hours of receiving the video. How these compare with the wider market.
Before you send anything
Do you play chess?
Not at a level worth putting on a page, and the job does not need it. What it needs is knowing which position is worth explaining and which reaction sells it, and that came from cutting nine chess channels rather than from a rating. Where a clip turns on something genuinely technical, I ask you rather than guess.
Do I have to send the whole stream?
Send the whole thing if you have it. A stream archive is mostly dead air with occasional spikes, so triage is part of the work and the part most editors skip. If you already know which moments matter, tell me and the job gets cheaper, because selection is what you are really paying for.
Can you work from a podcast with no board on screen?
Yes, and it is a different job. Perpetual Chess has no board to cut to for minutes at a stretch, so selection is about arguments and anecdotes rather than positions. More than 500 clips out of that archive have done north of 3M views.
My channel teaches rather than entertains. Does that change things?
It changes what a clip is allowed to be. The standard short-form move is to withhold, and a cliffhanger that teaches nothing damages the product a teaching channel is actually selling. ChessDojo clips had to stand as complete lessons, which is a narrower brief and a different definition of a good moment.
How fast is delivery?
Standard delivery is within 48 hours of receiving your video link and anything else the edit needs, unless something else is agreed up front. What moves that date is missing footage or a slow round of feedback, not the edit.
What if the clips do not work?
Buy one Short at $20 before committing to a month. That is what the one-off products are for, and it tells you more than any portfolio can. If the selection is wrong, that is the thing to find out for fifty dollars rather than three hundred.
Send me one video
Tell me what the channel is and I will tell you what is sitting unclipped in the archive. If it is worth cutting, I will say so; if it is not, that is a shorter conversation and a cheaper one.