The Open Amateur

Surveying the Virtual Chess Landscape

I don't think I'm alone in finding the plethora of chess servers, playing sites, websites and even blogs, headspinning at times.

A long time ago you turned up at a local chess club and played chess for several hours and that was your chess for the week and in some parts of the country that wasn't even possible. Tournaments in the UK for amateurs were few and far between until the "chess explosion" in 1972 with Bobby Fischer's world championship success. We now in 2009, have a relatively healthy weekend chess scene here in the UK, despite the steady decline of many of our most prestigious events like Kensington Congress and Rapidplay. But we have a some notable events which hold up our chess calendar year in and year out - Golders Green, Richmond, Coulsdon, Spectrum events, Blackpool and our ever present 4NCL chess league principal of these. Though still not many international tournments (Hastings, Guernsey International Chess Festival and the British Championships being exceptions). The Dutch and German chess scenes put us to shame to be honest.

Anyway back to "Virtual Chess". Way back in the 80's I was one of the first members of an online band of players who played via telnet and then eventually with a interface called "Xboard" and "Winboard" http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard.html

I loved the server, and became an admin and even contributed by developing it and running it with other admins. This server later became the Internet Chess Server (ICS) a subscription free server for chess loving, internet pioneers, and eventually what we know now as the "Internet Chess Club" (ICC) a subscription site. http://www.chessclub.com/

However ICS still lives on as FICS (Free Internet Chess Server). http://www.freechess.org/

Well apart from the chess servers what else is there? Well there are many yahoo style game network websites. But for the dedicated sites for the serious chessplayer there are still plenty. ChessCube, GameKnot (a game network but with a decent dedicated chess website), Playchess.com (run by ChessBase), chess.com, Facebook Chess Club Live (site run for Facebook chess playing members), LetsPlayChess.com, Net-Chess.Com and many more.

Ok so you have setup you account in one or more of the chess websites available to you. What next? Well you play as much you can on the site to establish a decent rating. You challenge established players but brace yourself for a lot of rejection, it can be notouriously difficult to get games if you have not established one yet. Well once you have this rating you get your "chess cred". You then find you don't get ignored as much and you get more challenges from other players, you might even make friends on the site. However this rating does not have any bearing on real "OTB" (over the board) chess. Yes! you can play for years on an online chess club and hold an established standard slow play chess rating for years but it won't be recognised by your national chess body or by FIDE. Indeed if you registered for a tournament and put your online "virtual" chess club down as your club, I don't know many tournament organisers who would recognise it as valid club. This is at odds really with the way we all lead our lives these days. Online shopping, working from home, Facebook friends etc.

I want my virtual chess career to be recognised in the real world. Get virtual!

---