paid online chess recommendations?

All Things Chess
1

Hello,

I’ve become interested in the game again after some time away and have been researching the fee-based online chess “hangouts”–the Internet Chess Club (chessclub.com) and Chess.com specifically.

Does anyone have a recommendation or preference between these or another they may recommend? I’m using a Mac and have been trying out the ICC’s Mac client (which seems to work pretty well). I noticed that Chess.com seems to use Java for some features.

I realize this is a somewhat open-ended question…

Thanks in advance…

Matt in Waynesville, NC

2

Ok, this got fried last time i tried writing… Try two, and somewhat briefer. If you need elaboration PM me and i’ll be happy to write more.

My answer will be avant-garde, but as someone in your shoes 15 months ago, i think my answer makes sense.

My top choice would actually be playchess.com

The server itself if you buy it alone is overpriced. But if you’re coming back from 5+ years off, go buy yourself houdini, fritz, or something. It will come with a 6 month premium membership or a 1 year standard membership (i recommend the premium membership if you can make some of the stuff).

You won’t regret your choice.

For starters, the archiving functionality on playchess is superior to your other choices. The interface of the chessbase products is simply superior. (I have fritz, which isnt the best engine, but you could buy one of several engines on the fritz/chessbase interface, and get the best of all worlds)

The largest audience for chessbase is unfortunately in europe which is very unfortunate for weekdays (their free radio programs or watching live grandmaster games may prove a challenge for you on the east coast), but they have a very wide range of players, from several titled players down to catastrophically bad woodpushers. If you play mostly at 10:00 PM EST, the server is less populous but you should be able to get a game.

Better still, every game you’ve ever played gets saved. When you pull up an old game, with the shifting of one tab can then go through the opening database they give you (2 mil or so games), or add your own even bigger database, and see how your lines hold up, and more importantly, when your opponent did somethign new to you, look at the most common replies. You can have fritz (or more likely houdini) analyze your slow games and do so at a much better level than the competition. And there are enough bells and whistles that it’s really a beautiful product. When your playchess.com membership expires though… you may want to:

  1. switch to chess.com

The best things about chess.com are that there are a wide range of players there, and at the bottom end of the scale that can be really nice. (as a 13xx in the USCF right now, frequently on ICC i’m the worst player to enter their nightly low rated tournament)

I’d also say the fact is all their functionality is free, although limited, it’s still plentiful. You can play 3 live tournaments a week, but they offer them every 15 minutes (at different speeds). Their correspondence play is pretty good, their iphone app is legitimately excellent for that purpose, and their tactics server is even better than playchess for me (too often the right answer on playchess is to sacrifice a forkload of material in the most spectacular way possible and it sort of misses the nuances of some of the tactics).

If you like chess.com as a free service, but want more, then upgrade. The downside to me is if it is a free service the lack of archiving, the poor quality of the archived games in general, the inferior analysis quality (though i havent used toaster at 2500), and the general difficulty in getting help (again this might be cause i’m not paying, but ICC has a pittsburgh # and generally more support.

That leaves ICC. Which is probably the 3rd best service. It’s upsides are that chess.fm is breathtakingly good, and i’d buy some of those shows separately if i could (maybe that functionality is there and i just dont know how to download it).

The timestamping on moves (also in playchess) is nice for goign over games, and the quality of players is pretty high.

They also have alot of the sidegames (bughouse etc), but for the reasons below, this is not always actualized.

To me, the biggest downside is the server interface. You have to download a separate program. The most popular program can’t run all of the features, and the most powerful program looks like it was written by some diabolical CMU Grad, and my guess is you would have had to pass 15-127 to intiutively understand all of the unix era commands (finger, etc).

Analyzing games or exporting all of your games via email to a pgn file is nearly impossible, and the idea of an opening games database just isnt there. The server is us based, so the live game shows are at the right tiem, but the formatting is just so 20th century, and for the diehards who are used to it it’s probably more than fine, but for me i found it not-so-easy just to become almost passably proficient.

Alot of people will disagree, however, and their viewpoints may be valid.

As someone in your shoes not too long ago though, i can tell you, the best thing you can do is to buy a chess base product up front, because even after the playchess membership expires (and then you have a real decision as to which server to continue on), fritz or whatever you buy will be completely worth it.

3

All three services are good, and they are all a little different. Try them all and see which one you like the best. I actually prefer ICC for two reasons mainly. The online commentary and the fact that it’s easier to get a late night game than Playchess.

4

That’s somewhat what I am doing. lol I’ve played a few games on both ICC and chess.com. Still just trying to feel them out.

Thanks for the reply.

5

instantchess.com allows 50 free games before you pay through the nose :mrgreen:

6

I am a big fan of the video content on ICC. Yermolinsky’s weekly lecture “Every Russian Schoolboy Knows” is alone worth the price of admission.

All three services are very good.

7

utbear and billbrock both have legitimate points, and all three are good choices of servers in my mind (better than say… yahoo (which i think has a pay to play version but almost certainly wouldnt be worth it), and chess cube and some of the others.

chess.fm in general is awesome, and icc having a bigger US Base helps on weeknights.

The original poster also had a mac, and the ICC client may well be better on the mac than my Windows machine, in which case i’d be lean more towards icc to the point of possibly redoing my rankings.

Also, somewhat inconveniently, it looks like you need to run bootcamp or some similar program for fritz, as they are all windows based, which i didnt realize until yesterday.

with that said, the fritztrainer dvd product is a better format than the chess.fm radio shows (in spite of the excellent content on chess.fm), in that if you disagree with a commentator, you can pause the dvd, pop your alternate line in, and have your engine evaluate your thought. Or if you think the commentator is just wrong when they say “black is better in this line”, you can get an opinion from the engine. These are things you could theoretically also do in chess.fm, but its’ a much much more laborious process.

And, given that he’s new to chess, just getting an elite engine right away is hugely useful for training, game analysis, game databases etc. I feel like the technology alone available to me, without any human lessons and not much in the way of books, printed material, etc, has bumped my rating probably 300 points above what it might be.

I just don’t know what that might be for the mac.

8

the Mac client for ICC is good. It’s still in beta from my understanding and a new release is coming out shortly.

I personally use both Chess.com and ICC as each has strengths and weaknesses but together I think they cover the entire spectrum of what a chess player would want.

9

Good points throughout this thread. My inflation-adjusted $0.02 is that the service you want probably depends on what features you find most useful.

I have a playchess account, courtesy of my ChessBase subscription. It’s a good service. Chess.com is quite good as well. However, I use my ICC account the most, and my son has an account there too.

Some of that is familiarity - I started out using FICS (back in the day, relatively speaking), and a lot of the people I knew from FICS moved to ICC once it started, so it was a pretty comfortable switch.

I am horribly biased in favor of the Blitzin interface for ICC, but that’s probably because I used it since it was first released, so the commands are pretty natural for me. And ICC has loads of features. TrainingBot, Mr. Spock, the various recorded GM lectures, the live commentary on top events…it’s a tremendous value for chess education. (My son uses the Dasher interface, which is much more graphical than Blitzin.)

The other thing I love about ICC is the mobile interfaces. I can play on my Note II, my iPhone or my iPad. (The mobile interfaces, of course, are somewhat stripped down, but you can still get a game, and the connection is actually pretty good for me. I tend to fat-finger moves on my touch screens, but I can still get my chess fix just about anywhere.)

[NOTE: I must confess to a bit of hypocrisy. I used to poke fun at Bill Goichberg and Steve Immitt for refusing to abandon DOS SwissSys long after Thad Suits had upgraded the interface…and here I am, slavishly devoted to a command-line-heavy interface.]

10

What’s the difference between free and paid online chess except for the price?

11

I just started playing on live.chess.com under “Jion_Wansu”. I like the tournaments

12

jion, I am assuming your not trolling us here and want an real answer. There are a significant number of differences. I have tried to rank these in some order of something, but failed. This is not an exhaustive list. For comparisons sake, i will use yahoo as the comparison point, but most of these also apply to MSN, etc.

  1. Fewer cheaters on the paid site. Both ICC and Playchess are very good at nabbing cheaters. The methods they use are sophisticated and fairly impressive. I don’t know how good chess.com is, but i know of one person (a former us correspondence champion from when before computers were great), who got banned from chess.com for multiple accounts (his son had made an account at the same time). SO maybe they are too good, or maybe if he had a paid membership he would have had access to a moderator/sysop more easily. Yahoo i know for a fact does next to zero cheater catching really. Yahoo just doesnt have the budget for the help that’s avaialble on the paid sites.

  2. Better players are on the paid sites. You may think this may not matter. You can enter open tournaments on chess.com, and playchess and possibly if you spring an early upset get a titled player. (I was paired against a FM four weeks ago on chess.com, and just in the few minutes between games got some meaningful feedback.). But more importantly, playing people slightly stronger than you is the best way to improve. Yahoo i am almost certainly in the top 10% of users there, (ditto with getting paired randomly in chess with friends). Chess.com i am above average, but still on the fat part of the bell curve (there are a mix of free and paid members there). ICC and playchess i am as weak relatively speaking there as i am strong at yahoo. But both of those paid servers are big enough i can get plenty of games against people around my level.

  3. Better server functionality, and way more features in setting games. IE: more control over increments, less server lag, better treatment of the game when there is lag on one party but not the other, a better interface, etc.

  4. Aesthetics. You’d think this is minor, but if you look at your monitor all day at work and try to get in a game at 30 minutes a side at a late hour, the design matters.

  5. “Bells and Whistles”. These are varied. Chess.com has the tactics trainer which is excellent (and the free version lets you try three a day and tracks your “rating”. Chess.com also has some sort of silman course you can go through. ICC has the training bots, that you can not only play full games against, but also play end games (ie: try to work on two bishops vs king), puzzles, etc. Many offer chess960 in some form. Playchess has a few very nice features of its own.

All of them have some sort of “Radio/live commentary function”. They cover different games, that you can also see on your computer live as they are happening. A weakeness of playchess is that the coverage of the us events is more limited (ie: USCL), where on ICC you might get someone like Yermolinsky watching four or five USCL games at once, commenting as the games are streaming, and immediately point out a blunder or a positional subtlety. Playchess makes up for this with excellent commentary of the events like Wijk an Zee, and sometimes you get a really, really good commentator in each case.

  1. More “fun events”. ICC and PLaychess frequently have simuls against titled players. All three have tournaments, sometimes with giveaways (an extra month tacked on to your membership or in some cases a trip somewhere or something).

  2. Varying levels of archiving abilities. ICC i’m guessing is good but the interface baffles me (Boyd i’ve tried bltizin and had to give it up… and I grew up being knowledgable about dos!), chess.com gives you pretty good access if you pay, and playchess is breathtaking, especially when it combines with the chessbase or fritz interface. After you play a game, you can look it up, with in a few clicks replay the game, with potentially an engine as strong as houdini watching over the moves for you, telling you what tactical shots you misssed, where you/your opponent blundered, and at what point in the game did you leave book. You can also know that say… after 5 moves this position has been reached in say… 1100 games, with 33% of them won by white, 45% drawn, and 22% wins for black, and what the most likely continuations were.

Yahoo is very DIY when it comes to archiving, but i think they at least let you email your live games.

:sunglasses: Training. Not just the live commentary, but we’ve already covered the chess.fm series (someone highly recommended yermolinsky and he seems like he’d be good if you were 1600+, but they have commentary aimed at 1200 level players by people like dan heisman). Chess.com also has videos (That i cant vouch for), and playchess has live shows. As mentioned, i am very partial to fritz dvds. The formatting, and capabilities to challenge everything the grandmaster says combined with the databases is something that just wasn’t avaialbe. In another thread i compared it to the difference bewteen riding a bike made in teh 1950s and a bike made today. Which one would you rather race with?

To me, it’s a no brainer. If you have the money (and the monthly cost in some cases is less than the gas you spend on a roundtrip of 40 or 50 miles to a tournament), teh paid servers are worth it.

13

Just wanted to say thanks again for all the (very helpful) feedback.

To answer someone’s comment, I purchased a copy of HIARCS Chess Explorer for the Mac a couple weeks ago.

http://www.hiarcs.com/mac-chess-explorer.htm

I had been using Sigma Chess, the apparent precursor to Chess Explorer, for a handful of years in the little bit of playing I did. (6 games a year or so? lol) So purchasing it seemed like a fairly good decision.

Thanks again…

14

Click on subscription at the bottom of the front page for more info.

15

Does anyone know what happened to the USCF’s old uschesslive.org site? The author mentions it here:

The Everything Chess Basics Book
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Chess-Basics-Hobbies-Games/dp/158062586X

I found a couple old forum threads which mention it being shutdown for “misuse” and also for spreading spyware(?). Would just be curious to know…

Thanks.

Matt

16

I believe it was absorbed by chessclub.com (ICC)

17

Yes, and that is where the dasher interface originated. It was the interface used for US Chesslive.

18

I have to echo the thoughts of others who have recommended ICC. ICC is, by far, the gold standard in online chess.

When I sat down, about three months ago, to pick a place to call my chess “home” online - I did extensive research.

Do the following:

  1. Buy a subscription to ICC and download blitzin or dasher.
  2. Register an account with FICS and download BabasChess.
  3. Buy a gold subscription to ChessTempo.
  4. Register a free subscription to Chess.com

This right here is the setup I recommend. You don’t need Chess.com’s diamond membership as all it really does it give you a neat, user friendly collection of resources. The tactics trainers, videos, web based GUI, etc is all light years behind what you get on Dasher and BabasChess, along with utilizing the rest of the internet to research and study chess.

Spend a ton of your time playing games on ICC and FICS. This is where the real players go to play and where you’re going to get punished the most severely for mistakes. Chess.com has free subs and as a result…the rating system there is horribly unbalanced because a lot of the “1200’ish” rated players are just sockpuppet accounts for high rated chess masters. ICC and FICS strongly enforce both the policy of no cheating and of not allowing multiaccounters.

Chess.com is extremely user friendly and extremely commercial. If your goal is to get really, really good at this beautiful game - Spend your time on ICC and ChessTempo’s tactics trainers, while using Chess.com’s forums and groups to connect with others.

Joe

19

chess.com hit the 7M member mark today. redhotpawn.com(has subscribers)has a new look. feel free to check it out at your convenience. thank you.

20

something i’ve pondered (and i’m a part of both ICC and playchess) that is somewhat annoying but right now is irrelevant to me but may be relevant soon.

with icc: chess.fm is really one of the biggest perks. There is more content published than most normal people could consume, and you can really get into detail about which stuff you want. Furthermore, it’s all FREE with your subscription.

The area that it falls down, and unless if someone corrects me, is that there is currently no legal way to view the chess.fm videos from a spot without wifi or slow wifi, such as a mediocre hotel room (or a really ritzy hotel room that tries to hit you for $20 a day for high speed), or maybe more mundane things such as…

  1. taking a 45 minute train into the city for work daily
  2. hitting the treadmill for half an hour three times a week.

I’d be willing to pay something like Itunes prices for DRM access to the chess.fm videos. I’d probably put a 3 figure sum into ICC"s coffers at 3-5 dollars per 30 minute video.

My limited legal understanding is that with itunes, i dont actually own what i buy, i have the right to my personal use of the items, and if i croak my heirs don’t have rights to the stuff. Now i understand that DRM access gets abused all the time, and ICC and or the content creators may not be willing to make that stuff available, but you can’t really read a book on a treadmill or exercise bike, but i can set up a table and listen to and watch video. Similarly i end up flying a decent amount. Same idea.

ICC is definitely probably the best website for getting top US players (but not worldwide). That hole in chess.fm though is an opportunity to make money.