yeah there are lots of sites that do correspondence games (moves in days or weeks), most of them you just use in your browser.

recently I've been playing on chess.com which is the best of the ones I've tried (best interface/good player pool), others are gameknot.com, redhotpawn.com, itsyourturn.com, lots of others. Itsyourturn has lots of different games and almost certainly has shogi and xiangqi, the interface sucks though.

i've been playing on facebook and timeforchess.com

i don't particularly like timeforchess so am looking for somewhere else. also the facebook ratings are terrible. i'm about a 1700 on there.

chessbase is as well far better than FICS.
There's in fact not much difference between the quality of ICC and chessbase.
All the top GMs play on both. And they show more livegames on chessbase imo. (often being commentated by GMs, i remember i saw Anand and Kasparov there).

Another great advantage of the pay sites that has not yet been mentioned is that cheating is almost impossible.
And i think most of the free sites don't substract the time your move needs to reach the server from the time spent on the clock.

Playchess is free for me at least.

You can play there for free but without being able to chat or use some other good features.

What other features?

FICS has timeseal.

playing for money for example

aka My Rybka can beat Your Rybka.

+1

Playchess, fics and ICC. Nothing else is close

IAWTP.

I used to be a FICSer, but the main thing I found was that it was very difficult to get a lot of medium-time limit games going, because the pool of players was often quite small. Chesscube seems to consistently have a good amount of players, and it is easy to find opponents for 30+30 or flat 30, and even quite easy for G90 if I want a practise for real life. While I am sure the ratings are relatively accurate on FICS, because the player pool is larger, there is a sort of intermediate deflation, so when you're in the 1500-1600 area, it is easier to end up floating there, but I find the Cube ratings very accurate compared to ECF conversion. I must say though I haven't found chesscube support that helpful in general; several bug reports including games being assigned wrong result never replied etc. To those who have played on both Cube and FICS, is it me, or is the general tactics skill level lower on Cube?

May I rant for a minute here?

ICC is great - you get so much for what you pay for - a choice of interfaces, the videos and live coverage - no gripes -

Playchess is ok too - like the interface a lot

Having said that, I've been a lot more suspicious lately of Playchess then ICC - remember any nimrod who buys Fritz 12 gets a free year - (and that's the only way to watch their videos right now) and I've been getting smoked by players ranked pawns (meaning they've played 6 games or less) but have 200+ games in their account, meaning they were probably busted for cheating and demoted to pawn at some point.

In other words, I think there's a lot more incentive to cheat or use aids when you're not losing any money if you get caught - that's why I've been playing more on ICC lately - I may start just playing Knight/Bishop players on Playchess, but I'm done playing those ranked pawns with 1200 games - LOL

For that reason I've been suspicious of FICS as well, but not so badly - it's just a thing for me - I did get my butt handed to me almost twice by a 1200 player who seemed to konw more about my openings then I did -

rant off