With COVID19 knocking out many chess clubs for the next several months, can anyone suggest a website that can substitute? Of course it would have a chess server but also allow members to watch each other’s games, message the group or individuals, issue or respond to challenges, and talk to others watching a specific game.
Ignoring the chess club aspect of it, what are the better chess servers?
The two that US Chess has relationships with are ICC and Chess.com. I don’t use either of them so I can’t offer an opinion on relative advantages.
Chess.com has been advertising this. One can also form a private club/server by using ChessBase, and a browser on the other end.
I’ve set up a virtual club room on Playchess, the server run by Chessbase. It functions very well for playing and chatting. You can also run tournaments of various kinds and simuls from the room.
While you can enter the room as a guest, guests can’t chat and you have no way of knowing who the guest is. A one year premium membership to Playchess, which gives access to numerous features on the Chessbase cloud server, costs about $57 per year. I consider that a bargain for what you have access to.
If you decide to set up a club room, just be aware that you have to “open” the room by going there as the room administrator using a browser, close the browser window and then log on to Playchess via a Fritz type Chessbase program or with the Playchess Windows 10 app. Once you open the room, it appears to stay open for at least 12 hours. To run tournaments from the room you must have the rank of Bishop which you normally obtain by frequent logins and playing of games. However, if you email Chessbase, they will assign you the Bishop rank immediately so that you can run tournaments.
Does this make it possible to run tournaments between US Chess members? How would the TD know who everyone really is?
The local club has been running quick tournaments when the club usually meets wih lichess for the last few weeks.
Digging this back up just to say that we’ve been online in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois for two months now. We have no immediate plans to return to OTB status at this time.
(Might be nice to have a special listing of where ‘online’ clubs are, even if it amounts to only this thread. Keep meaning to bug Smith to send something in to the national directory about our online status.)