I recently went through this after trying to decide which premium site to go to, so I thought I'd share my findings.

PlayChess: ChessBase's site.

Pros:

-the site automatically interfaces with ChessBase database, Fritz and presumably most of ChessBase's software. It's just convenient to easily flip between the database and the site.

-slick interface. the interface is extremely simple to use and quite nice. there's an entertaining little geo-locator that shows your rough geographic location as well as everybody else's so you can see if there's any other PlayChess players playing very close to you.

-lots of players! the site has significantly more players than ICC.

Cons:

-no sort of automated match making system. you're forced to manually seek out challenges and hope somebody accepts.

-the average player is quite weak. it does have way more than players than ICC, but it seems that every single German is given a PlayChess account at birth. ChessBase is a German company and there's some sort of nationalism going on here. I had a hard time getting games against strong players. I'm not entirely sure why this was as there are plenty of GM's and others that make this their home site, but this is what I encountered.

-very minimal chat. this could definitely be a pro depending on how you look at it! ICC provides a more IRCish interface. PlayChess is there almost exclusively to well... play chess. ICC is more about playing chess and chat.

-no sort of free training available. on ICC there are countless free lectures/etc available. PlayChess has a wide variety of archived lectures and other topics available on demand, but they all cost $.

ICC: A private company that, as far as I know, was the first major pay-to-play chess site.

Pros:

-strong players! first and foremost. there are tons of very strong players on ICC constantly playing. about 25% of my games on ICC are against FM/IM/GMs which is just extremely good for learning and improving.

-automated match making. Just type "5" or "15" and you'll be paired with a comparably rated player in a 5 0 or 15 0 game very quickly. As a small downside, the 15-min pool is very weak. After playing 10 games I did not face a single player who would have been above ~1800 USCF. The 5-min pool is full of very strong players and where I put the vast majority of my play in.

-lots of free training. ICC constantly has free lectures, strong masters analyzing live games, etc.

-chat! ICC has hundreds of populated chat channels on every topic from opening theory to politics to philosophy. I'd recommend avoiding the politics channel though. The subset of chess eccentrics with political eccentrics is a really scary group.

Cons:

-Terrible interfaces. There are two primary interfaces available. Blitzin and Dasher. Blitzin is the older interface and is normally quite nice, but when I used it on vista there piece set was low resolution and blurry with no apparent way to fix it. This was not a problem when I played a couple of years ago (on XP). But either way, it rendered it unusable under vista, and their only support was unable to help.

The other interface is Dasher. It looks much nicer, but it's extremely annoying. Absolutely everything pops up in a window. If you want to finger somebody (look at their rating/etc), it pops up in a new window. If you want to see what games somebody has played recently, it pops up in a new window. Even the chat channels are all in a new window with tabs for each channel. It's also poorly programmed. If you are logging your games to a database (as it can automatically do), and have said database open when you complete a game then the program will crash. This happens to me constantly as I look through my games after playing them in my database and often forget to close it before starting a new game.

-Fewer players than PlayChess. This should mean a smaller playing pool, but in my experience there is a substantially wide playing pool at higher ratings.

-The server can be somewhat unreliable. They tend to do things like server maintenance while the server is running. This lags everybody to no end, and can often result in disconnecting/forfeiting games, etc. And I tend to get disconnected from the site fairly frequently (about once every 2-3 hours). That said, I'm playing from Thailand, but I had the same problem when playing from the states.

Both Sites:

Both sites have plenty of additional offerings like tournaments (sometimes for real money prizes), private chess coaching and a wide variety of chess variants such as bughouse.

My opinion is that ICC is miles ahead of PlayChess.

I wouldn't say that ICC is MILES ahead, but in general it's probably somewhat better than Playchess. As I am European, I used to play for Playchess for like 3 years without even knowing about ICC. I absolutely love Playchess interface, it's not even fair to compare it with ICC in my opinion. There are also a decent amount of strong players, though ICC is definitely ahead here. Also, ICC definitely has more free lectures and stuff, but I would say that the live commentary of important events is not worse in Playchess. Audio+video commentary by a strong GM, with other GM's constantly writing stuff in chat, + it's free, so I cannot see a reason why it is worse than ICC. In general, it depends on what you need - ICC has more strong players, probably a little bit better atmosphere too. Playchess has a way better interface (board included), + you can sometimes see Kasparov there Now I play on both of them, depends on the mood.

Hmmm, yeah. Failed to mention my conclusion. I'm playing at ICC now.

I've never played on PlayChess.

Blitzin and Dasher are dreams compared to past interfaces, but then I've been on ICC since inception, and on it's free precursor ICS since 1992, using DOS based interfaces.

I subscribed on ICC for one year, but now I'm a playchess reg. Main reason is simple: Because I am german, I was given an account at birth, and all of my chess friends play there. Also, the overall appearance is just better (interface etc.).

The only feature from ICC that I really miss is the automated pool system.

qft

ICC is the nuts

<3 blitzin

I recently started playing on ICC. Dasher is really annoying in many ways (see Dire, especially the popups). On the other hand, BlitzIn has also a lot of points that I dislike (annoying sound; no history vs player displayed when you look up his profile+ some more). It also seems slower though I may be wrong.

I didn't really adjust either program yet and use mostly the defaults. Which program would you recommend? Which program can be adjusted better?

thx for this!

Dasher is actually pretty nice once you get it configured properly. Here's a few key things:

edit->settings

general:
-uncheck open a chat window upon tell

appearance:
-uncheck channel tabs

playing:
-check autosave games, set a file for it
-disable all animation (optional, but it's pointless)

In the playing window itself with the pieces/etc the 5th button from the left toggles that chat window attached to the playing board. If you get rid of it all messages go to the main console, but it's not bad either.

In the main console type: "set webhelp 0".

And now for a "trick". Let's say you want to finger somebody to see their stats/etc, and you don't want it to popup in a new window. What you have to do is add two spaces between finger and their name so instead of: "finger smallville" you'd do: "finger smallville" with two spaces. So far as I can tell this actually works for every command as well. Looks like one of the programmers also thought the obsession with windows and popups was kind of lame.

There are a few more tweaks that I can't recall off the top of my head, but that makes it a million times more bearable than it is by default.

I actually like the pop-up windows. If you're chatting with three different people and trying to finger a bunch of GMs, it's nice to have separate windows.

Thanks Dire, those were some really good tips!

How does fics compare?

FICS seems pretty weak. I've been goofing around on there lately playing fischerrandom and I run into somebody with a pulse about 1 out of every 10 games. And I'm not that good, only the low end of expert when I played my last tourney in 2000 or 2001.

Nice summary.

You can set up a filter for the opponent's rating. A grandmaster with a playchess rating of 2650, for example, will usually accept only 2500+ opponents.

at the current rate of i think 30 euros/year for playchess i would definitely play on ICC, but my birthright acc is free, so i use that

Also i think matchmaking isn't bad at all, you select a time rate and a rating filter (e.g. 1900-2300) and are automatically paired if someone who passes your rating filter and vice versa offers a game with the same time rate. If you're not ridiculously selective (like play only guys rated 200+ points higher) you get a game within seconds at 3/0 or 5/0.

It doesn't really. Vastly fewer players than either premium site, an interface that just doesn't compare and a site with no real features or perks. I could not really recommend FICS. ICC is only $5/month. PlayChess is even less.

I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't need to play IMs+ to get suitable competition. Open protocols so anyone can write an interface for it, so there is a lot of choice of good interfaces. Good atmosphere. More competition in variants such as bughouse (partly because it allows interfaces that are actually written with these in mind).

The interface is, like ICC, probably a bit harder to learn than Playchess if you don't really use computers much. And it has dozens of lectures instead of hundreds, so it can't compete with ICC there. It's also missing a few cool features like the "5-minute" pairing system, but this doesn't affect your ability to get a game, only (in theory) the accuracy of the rating system.

Less players than either of the other sites -- in practice this means unless you are 2200+ you'll be waiting 10 seconds for a suitable game instead of 3.

Well run with no scummy business practices to support. Looked down on by people like Dire for spurious reasons (he hated the ICC interfaces too until he did a bit of customization). I definitely wouldn't recommend paying for ICC/Playchess unless you've tried FICS and decided you didn't like it.

Wow, RoundTower you keep really unjustly defending FICS here. This isn't even close. Here is the news happenings for what's going on ICC TODAY:

Wed May 20, 0630 - SIMUL IM De Dovitiis ch 71 "finger dedo2"
Wed May 20, 0700 - TOURNAMENT Early Morning, 7 Rounds 3 1 "finger EarlyMorning"
Wed May 20, 0900 - LIVE COVERAGE Mtel Masters "finger Mtel09"
Wed May 20, 1130 & 1300 - Chess21 Blitz Series 5 rounds 5 0 "help weekday"
Wed May 20, 1500 - Chess.FM video Attack with LarryC! "help ChessFM"
Wed May 20, 1600 - WGM Martica Fierro time odds blitz "finger MarticaFierro"
Wed May 20, 1800 - SIMUL FM Mussanti 30 boards ch 71 "finger clalauquen"

This is ONE DAY of events. The two tournament events listed have free months of membership for the top finishers, and there are also class sections - meaning you could freeroll your membership on ICC if the money is that big a deal. And this is just the scheduled events, unscheduled events such as titled players offering free simuls/etc occur constantly.

What unique events are going on on FICS today? Nothing. I could do this every single day and it would never change. I promise you that Wednesday isn't some freak day for ICC where they jam all their special events.

FICS doesn't have dozens of lectures. I can't actually remember it ever having a single lecture. When I say lecture I'm not talking about stuff where any odd player can record them saying stuff and have it replayed by a bot. I mean real interactive, live stuff given by masters. And I'm not some neophyte to FICS, or its interfaces and the like. When I wanted to intentionally avoid getting too interested/involved in chess, I chose to play on FICS. I've had an account on there since 2001 with a total time spent online of more than 60 days with more than 6,000 games played. My opinion is somewhat the opposite of spurious.

I really hate to just bash away on FICS - but really, it's just not in the same league at all here.

anyone play on World Chess Live? basically like ICC 5$ a month and i dont really care about that such a small amount and its great i find to play tournies there and know everyone you are playing against. makes it more fun as you can **** talk and joke around with one another

lol what? they have at least coverage of the MTel Masters and some small tournaments (that also offer free membership to FICS, incidentally).

ICC has some cool stuff FICS doesn't have, FICS has some cool stuff ICC doesn't have (principally other interfaces and chess variants). Why not just leave it at that? It's not me who's on an anti-ICC crusade here.

Live coverage doesn't mean somebody stealing ICC's coverage and relaying the moves on FICS. It will typically include live commentary from a master or better player, discussion of variations, etc. And you're free to use whatever interface you want to on ICC, but there's a reason pretty much everybody on the site uses Dasher or Blitzin. I've actually never found a single person using something else, but I'd guess there is somebody somewhere out there that does.

And ICC also currently offers 29 different variants of chess including standard stuff like CrazyHouse / BugHouse, Kregspiel, Shatranj, Fischer Random and a then number of very exotic games.

So what exactly does FICS offer that ICC does not? Again, I'm not trying to bash you or FICS here - but I think it's just really disingenuous to even put FICS anywhere near the same league. It's not, and it's not even close to being there. This feels especially odd since I really kind of dislike ICC as a business, but again - they are simply the best.

lol this is just clueless. Typically both ICC and FICS (and Playchess, who got threatened with legal action over this recently) steal the moves from a third party, usually the organiser's website. Don't expect GM commentary, but there are regularly FMs+ joining the discussion on the games.

try reading my posts? If that doesn't work for you, try seeing how many bughouse games are going on on each of the sites right now. Just because ICC "offers" them doesn't mean it's a good place to play them.

edit: when I say steal, I think most of the time the organisers don't mind, and there may be nothing illegal about it anyway.

Obviously the only thing FICS has that ICC lacks is the ability to use it, in full, forever, for free. FICS is not a "premium" site and is beyond the scope of this thread, although it is clearly the cream of the crop among free non-premium chess options.