I’ve recently accepted role of Scholastic Coordinator of South Carolina Chess Association - scchess.org/ - and I’m researching options for school clubs to play tournaments online. Although I’m an ardent supporter of over-the-board, online play may enable more play with less cost of travel for schools.
I’m working on an options proposal for SC Department of Education. The issue is many schools block/filter chess play sites. How can I balance their security and still have chess players compete online? Does USCF endorse a site for play?
My initial thinking is to work with World Chess Live and have school network admins define WCL static IP as acceptable within South Carolina School Districts.
Any guidance would be, as always, greatly appreciated.
I understand that FICS (The Free Internet Chess Server) has been working on youth-oriented solutions - you can find out more about them and who to contact from their web site at freechess.org, I believe.
The executive in charge of World Chess Live once upon a time promised many things to USCF when operating his predecessor service, US Chess Live, and broke a number of contractual commitments to USCF along the way. Today, he and his current company continue to do so, as indicated by their refusal to grant me an account, and the problems recently described by another USCF member here:
So, in short, they have a history of rapacity and untrustworthiness, and currently, both WCL and their parent company, ICC, appear to be struggling compared to the era in which ICC was the market leader.
In any case, there is a long history of match play via telephone, telegraph, and more recently, the internet. The main thing is to make sure that each side is adequately supervised by officials who are trusted by the other side, and that an experienced and capable chief official is ultimately responsible for rules and their enforcement - including appeals if any occur. It should be possible to play on just about any server, and it may be possible to discover that someone has already built a reliable platform for a very small number of games that are essentially “privately” hosted.