In 1999, Garry Kasparov and Veselin Topalov played on of the greatest chess games of all time.
For an explanation of some of the crazy moves:
Rendered with Sheep It Render Farm and saved my computer approximately 30 days.
Music by Ross Bugden (Flight Hymn):
Textures made in Gimp and from Cgtextures.com
HDR (Ueno Shrine): http://hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive/
Oh yeah, I forgot to say that criticism is appreciated so I can learn from this project as best I can.
Any advice on the animation? I changed the thumbnail to be more viewer friendly.
Not bad, but you can improve it in my opinion 
Materials/models are good, maybe a bit too much graininess on the board, not sure if noise or some kind of bump/normalmap.
Environment: place the chess board on a table; rght now those looks like floor planks, out of scale…
Lighting: i usually prefer a more dramatic lighting, yours is “flat”.
Camera animation: you could have started with the camera as is now then, while rotating, move the camera up.
Animation equals story telling. So camera movement should be functional to this goal.
Do not rotate the camera during the entire movie, unless you want to give the viewer motion sickness.
Key moves could be dramatized (like the loss of the queen) with close shots and and an effect like camera shaking combined with darkening environment lighting.
And I actually do like the wooden floor, so no need for a table.
(Good taste is everything… but that’s just someones opinion about what is good and what is not. 
So, in the end. It always is your own taste that counts.)
