Besides facebook, cuz im sure not everyone wants to give out their personal info

I just started playing on the . So much better than yahoo or anything else I've used before.

Hm.. I mostly play on ICC and Playchess, but I believe they are both not free. I think one of my friends was saying good things about www.instantchess.com , you might want to try that out.

www.chesscube.com

good software and completely free.

FICS, FICS, FICS. www.freechess.org. FICS offers a lot of handy features (history of your last 10 games, has various ways of handling disconnecters, a cross-reference to the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings so you can figure out what opening it is you just played, occasional relays of major tournaments) for free. It also has a pretty broad pool of players that will certainly be good enough for you until you've gotten very, very good at chess. ICC and Playchess will have better top end competition, but they aren't free.

This, AINEC.

Gotta agree about FICS. Tons of players at all levels, and all sorts of chess variations too (find a partner and try bughouse!). The only thing I don't like about FICS (and ICC at the same time), is that they are not too user friendly. You need to know those commands to type in console and stuff.. Of course the basic game seeking and chatting are simple, so I guess it is not too bad

FMP

Fics is the best free site that i know of.
does anyone use Babas chess client for fics?
its much better than winboard imo.

+1 FICS

FICS. Not even close.

FICS is likely the best free site, but ICC is miles and miles ahead of it when you open the discussion to. As with most things in life, you get what you pay for.

all of this + gameknot is good for correspondence games

Gotta agree here. FICS is the best for free, but ICC is just so far ahead of it. Better players, better interface, lots of events and they also have 5-min and 15-min pools. 5-min and 15-min auto-pair you with a similarly rated opponent so its kind of like a nonstop tournament.

ICC is like $60 per year.

Not to mention all the GM commentary on important games, constant live coverage of the most important events and stuff like that. That $60 really does not seem too much when you see how much you get for that.

I strongly suggest spending the money on ICC if you are even remotely serious about chess, it's really worth it for players of all levels.

Just downloaded Babas. Thanks for the tip, I agree (haven't played chess online in forever though).

what curtains said.

+

there´s also chessbase.com , which has by far the best interface\software.
You´ll find most GM´s there too and many players on evey level.

This is a poker site, we can't afford to pay for chess!

I didn't think that this would turn into an ICC thread since ICC is a pay site, but yes, ICC is far superior to FICS. However, FICS is far superior to everything else.

I disagree that the ICC interfaces are much better than the FICS interfaces. (I use xboard.)

There are two reasons why ICC is better than FICS:

- you get games much quicker
- there is much more strong opposition

So to be honest I wouldn't recommend spending on ICC until you are like 1800 USCF or higher, because below that you can get games against similarly skilled opponents fairly easily and quickly on FICS. I still play on FICS and I'm 2000. However, if I ever decided to study and got up to like 2200 USCF, I would feel compelled to spend money on ICC just so that I could play against people at my level more frequently. Right now (on FICS) most of my games are against people who are weaker than me, and I'm just a weak expert. But it's not so bad yet that I'm willing to spend.

NO KIDDING! If i had 60 big ones, why would i be playing chess!?

A+

i just d/l this yesterday, seems pretty good... gonna customize the layout thought

one of the good things AllinMcLovin did in the OOT thread was create an unofficial 2+2 channel on FICS (like a chatroom). Join channel 202 by typing +ch 202.

Are there any sites that let you play long games? IE over a period of weeks? We were just talking about this in the Go thread and I was pointed to DGS; I would assume there must be an equivalent for Chess.

Also, do any of these sites (either the real-time ones discussed previously or slow games) have variants like Shogi and Xiangqi?