Places to Play Chess online, part 7 - Chesscube update

ChessCube Update: A message from the CEO | ChessCube Blog On June 21st, 2011 Chesscube changed their free to play model and now they charge you 15 cubits to play even unrated games. You have to "bet" an amount of cubits to be able to play. I can see this being a negative for people looking for free places to play chess. You can get 5000 cubits for $5 - which do expire slowly if you don't use them or you could use the small amount of free cubits they give you for logging in. Personally I dislike the change - they could have found another way to monetize. Related Posts
Places to Play Chess online
Places to Play Chess online, part 2
Places to Play Chess online, part 3
Places to Play Chess online, part 4
Places to Play Chess online, part 5
Places to Play Chess online, part 6

Places to Play Chess online, Part 6

Chesscube is another newer site to online chess. I have found it to be a very good place to play. The flash interface is great - makes it easy to be available across all platforms without any need to download an interface. You get cubits from logging in and winning games that will allow you to get chess videos. The tournaments are available all the time and you get a game fairly quickly. The only thing I would want is an Adobe Air application of the interface so I could avoid having to open my browser.
Here is a description from their website:

Play chess online for free on ChessCube, the global community of chess players. Get chess videos and chess lectures, chat with friends, play live chess and ...

If you want an easy place to get to play, don't mind using flash in a browser to connect to the server and want an interface that is standardized ChessCube is a very good option for playing chess. I have found it very good - especially when I only have access to a browser on a computer it becomes very nice.

Related Posts
Places to Play Chess online
Places to Play Chess online, part 2
Places to Play Chess online, part 3
Places to Play Chess online, part 4
Places to Play Chess online, part 5

Places to Play Chess online, part 5

Chessboss is a newcomer to the online chess arena. It is an all web interface - but it seems to be missing a lot of features. The biggest problem with Chessboss is the lack of players. Anyone can create and run a tournament which is nice. With the many other options it feels like Chessboss does not have a large enough following for one to have a good number of people to play with. But if you are looking for a quick casual game it might fit you.

Related Posts
Places to Play Chess online
Places to Play Chess online, part 2
Places to Play Chess online, part 3
Places to Play Chess online, part 4

Places to Play Chess online, part 4

Another good place to play chess online is Gameknot.com. There are some good things they provide. The teams are really cool, and the ladder is pretty nice as well. The problem with this site is that to get some of the nice features one must pay a pretty high membership fee. To be able to captain a team one must pay $60 a year. For that price it seems better to consider a Diamond chess.com account. You get a much better overall experience there. But if you are looking for another place to play some email games, Gameknot is fairly good.

Related Posts
Places to Play Chess online
Places to Play Chess online, part 2
Places to Play Chess online, part 3

Places to Play Chess online, part 3

One of the more popular places to play online chess is the Internet Chess Club.
It has been around for a long time.  ICC and FICS split many years ago when the internet was in its infancy.  FICS wanted to provide a free place to play chess while the ICC wanted to provide some services which had a cost.  Both are good sites and provide a good service.  ICC has a lot more players on normally, and there are some other benefits to the service.  The problem is the cost.  It costs $70 a year for a membership.  The price seems very high and it has kept me from playing there since there are many other places to play.

If the $70 a year is not a problem, ICC provides good services and has a good number of players to play against.  You get access to chess.fm - videos teaching chess.  Personally - I play at FICS and chess.com for free.

See my previous posts for more places to play chess online.
Places to Play Chess online
Places to Play Chess online, part 2

Places to Play Chess online, part 2

Another place that I have been playing online is chess.com. The major attraction here is the correspondence type games.  You add a seek or respond to one indicating that you are ready to play.  The time control is from 1 day per move all the way up to 14 days per move.  There are a good number of players here and the games seem to start fairly quickly.  They are very pushy about getting money from you which is annoying however.

There are also other features that they have that are nice.  Live Chess is available, which kind of functions as a Internet Chess Server via a browser.  It is not as good as FICS but it works.  They have video lessons which require one to be a member.  It is an interesting idea and the membership fee goes to pay the GMs and IMs who are creating the content.  There is a Game Explorer which is pretty worthless without a membership as well.  There are a lot more features, but most of them require payment.

The main reason to log into chess.com is the free correspondence play.  If you happen to be willing to shell out the money for the membership there are some interesting features for studying chess.

See my previous post for more places to place online chess, Places to play Chess Online

FICS (freechess.org) Interface Recommendation

In my previous post about Places to Play Chess Online, I recommended that everyone use Jin.  There are a lot of interfaces that work fairly well.  I review them in this post for each of the platforms I have used to connect to FICS.  See my Chess Links page for links to the various FICS interfaces.

OS X FICS Interfaces

• Jin - Highly recommended for OS X - great seek graph - cross platform
• Visir - No chat at all - makes it very hard to play in tournaments.
• Fixation - Newer - seems to have some basic features but does not work as well a Jin.

Linux FICS Interfaces

• Jin - Great seek graph - cross platform
• eboard - I like the board and console for this interface - works great and seems to be the best Linux interface
• Visir - No chat at all - makes it very hard to play in tournaments

Windows FICS Interfaces

• Jin - Great seek graph - cross platform
• Babaschess - Best windows interface - highly configurable - easy to use - probably the best interface to FICS.

Iphone FICS Interfaces

• Ichess Pack - Good seek table, connects to training with the online lectures, Endgame bot and PuzzleBot.

Places to play chess online

I am going to start going through the many places you can play online and give a review of them. If I don't have a membership I will try to use it as a free player.

The first place I will review is FICS (Free Internet Chess Server).

From their website (Freechess.org)I grabbed a real quick description

Play chess on the web for free.
The Free Internet Chess Server, with over 300000 registered users, is one of the oldest and one of the largest internet chess servers. Whether serious with your chess or just looking for the occasional game, whether looking for another player or eager to challenge a strong computer, whether you like a blitz chess or you are fond of one of the many variants, here you can play chess over the internet for free.

This is the best option I have found for free chess. There is good competition - almost always have a tournament running. They are stable and have been around a long time. If you have not logged into a Internet Chess Server before - you will need a client to connect. One of the best clients that exists to connect to FICS is called Jin Chess Client. This program runs on Linux, OS X and Windows. It connects you to the server - displays a graph of all the available games and provides a chessboard to make your moves on. There are many others as well but I have found this one to work best.

The Freechess.org staff have been around a long time and provide a great service to the chess community. Login and check them out.