It's more of a challenge, (and more fun) doing this with a real-life chess game. A friend and I challenged a buddy who was good at chess to a game (2 vs 1), a scenario which he usually defeated us in. I had to leave the room to enter his moves onto my desktop machine. The fun was making up excuses for leaving the room, and transmitting the moves to my partner without making it look suspicious (I pretended to be wired up on caffeine and extremely jumpy). "We" managed to defeat him quickly, but, after seeing how dissapointed he was, spilled the beans.
Awesome! I love that Chess 960 (aka Fischer Random) is a prominent choice.
It's a variant of chess where the back rank with all the pieces on it are in a random order (although the board is mirrored, so each side has their pieces in the same order).
My brother is a strong chess player, but eventually gave up the game because to improve he was having to spend more and more time memorizing opening lines. With chess 960 there are 960 different starting positions, so memorization doesn't help at all. I hope it gets more popular, it's a more purely strategic and tactical than standard chess.
That's really interesting. Do you know of any tournaments or communities that purely play that way? If so, did your brother consider moving to them rather than giving it up altogether? How old was your brother when he quit and how strong is "strong"?
He'd been scholastic state chess champion a couple times in a row and stuff. I think he was rated ~2000 USCF when he lost interest; I'm not sure how old he was -- probably late teens.
I don't know of any tournaments or communities with a major focus on chess 960, but that doesn't mean there aren't any out there. If you're looking to play, you can probably find matches on ICC (http://www.chessclub.com/help/Fischer-random). It's not free, unfortunately.
I was positively surprised by the fact that the site presented itself in my native language (polish) and it didn't suck. It's probably the first time ever I saw a site that autodetected a language and it actually felt nice. Not everything is translated though, and I hope you'll fix it one day :).
The site, though, is beautiful and a joy to play on. My last online chess was at Yahoo Chess, and this feels like walking on air compared to Y! Chess's clunky interface. Beautiful site, very pleasing to use.
A nice feature to keep semi-serious players around would be some way to get scored or sorted, so you somewhat consistently can get decent matches. Overall I really like it though, cheers.
Edit: Got a full game in - http://lichess.org/bsba_b - I was black. Made some mistakes, I'm rusty. But the interface is really a joy, I like it a lot.
Could this be the reason that registration would be a better idea, and thus explain the success of all the chess servers that require it? I'd much prefer to play against an evenly matched opponent, or with a stronger player who I can learn from by analysing the game with afterwards - and definitely against someone who will finish the game. Both of these things requires reputation, and reputation requires registration. I found fics to be great for this.
I apologise to whoever I annoyed by not even playing the first move. I wanted to see if there were _any_ options to discriminate my opponent (for example by supplying my own rating on an honour system); there were none.
It is nice, I agree that there should be some sort of difficulty level to select. I got paired with someone much better than I and lost pretty quickly. I am not a total newbie, but I'm far from being good :)
Here's a replay of me playing someone who outclasses and outplays me in every way but becomes overconfident and makes a careless mistake that costs him/her the game. I find it amusing because I don't imagine it being common for a weak player to beat a stronger opponent.
Once again I make no claim on my ability to play the game of chess. (I suck) This was more luck than anything but it's a good example of how you shouldn't give up/become too cocky before crossing the finish line.
It's also usually worth playing for a statemate when you're too far behind... the chances of it happening seem so slim that the opponent just goes into cruise control.
I've been thinking about doing this for a while. There's so many times when I want to play a game of chess with a friend online, but don't want to take the time to register an account at any of the big chess sites.
My idea would have been a service where you click "New Game", it generates a unique link which you then give to your friend.
I prefer FICS too, compared to web alternatives like lichess, you also get a glicko rating, history, win-loss count, lag stats, and you can find a game in an instant, as well as chat functionality and more.
The FICS database of games is also available on: http://www.ficsgames.com/ - currently hosts about 120 million games in its archive.
This is nice. I was a little saddened that the replay and analyse option after games did not actually analyse games, but with the export I can download the games into my favourite chess engine and have it analyse the games for me.
[edit: noticed that there is a forum, don't go there. While someone occasionally posts an interesting game like http://lichess.org/analyse/0mbole the level of conversation is roughly what you'd expect from a 4chan /chess/ board.]
I came in here to make the same point, though I too was pondering the karma hit. Have an upvote.
To drag another tangential fantasy/sci-fi reference into the discussion, in an episode of Blake's 7 Avon and Vila smuggled their supercomputer Orac into a space casino so Vila could play against The Klute, a wizened Davros-like house chess genius with a terrifying laugh. The prize for winning or drawing was 10 million space credits, lose and The Klute could choose your destruction.
Not bad at all as far as interface goes, but their timer is buggy. In 5 0 it ate 15 seconds of my time, apparently due to lag.
A thought I had for a while: do analysis on games as they occur and try to estimate opponents' strength, as a way to detect cheating of the type where one of the players mimics a computer. Computationally expensive, but would be fun to try.
I like it very much, it's fun to use, but do sth with the performance. At the moment "149 connected players" and it's hanging. It's 3rd game in a row for me when it's hanging once a few moves, now it's dead completely. Game over :(
OK, I see the clock now but it doesn't work like the traditional one, I played a 5 min "blitz" game and I would have like 5:05, is it using perhaps the Fisher's clock?
Still, it's unfriendly to newbies. You need to learn console commands. Also, the registration process does not allow webmail addresses. On places like chess.com or chesscube, you can pretty much start right away.
That said, I still prefer FICS for the greater flexibility in timings and the ability to review all past games.
