Chess.com

After doing some research and using the site personally, I think chess.com is the now the ultimate place to play chess online. Google also thinks that :)

Chess circle

This site is pretty neat. It has all the elements I envisioned of but UI is not that appealing. I guess it would improve with time and popularity

Gameknot

Gameknot is cool

After trying to find good chess website I find, gameknot to be cool. It has very good interface and has a lot of features for free members. Only problems I find are , slow loading times and lack of fast games. The blitz game feature is just random thing, and gosh I find 10 mins too long, (I play 3 mins in play chess)

Google chess(?)

Ideas for Google chess

1. Google vision, making world's information available
   
2. In lines of google books, scholar, etc.
   
3. Motivation: There are around 20 million games in chess base and this number is only a reflection of the actual figure
   
4. Popularity for chess can be found in blogs on chess, online chess playing sites which boast of 1 million users
   
5. Searching in chess games
   
6. Kinds of searching that can supported
   
   1. Players
      
   2. Tournaments
      
   3. Years
      
   4. Openings
      
   5. Stereotypical positions(isolani, castling on double sides)
      
   6. Typical board positions
      
   1. endgames
      
7. Much of the functionality is found in chess base but it is stagnant and closed and also expensive much of the non- europe folks don't use it
   
8. Ratings(FIDE, USCF) search
   

 

1. Revenue- as usual the ad's
   
2. Can have a large audience - tournaments, games, online chess
   

 

1. Future development can be online chess - integration into other online chess sites
   
2. A typical strong chess player spends around 70% of his effort in searching for good openings and strong players always strive for novelties.
   
3. Searching can also be done for tournaments, clubs, classes, coaches. Integration possible with google maps
   
4. Though I am not sure that general public will use this product. Chess players both serious and amateurs chess players will simply fall in love with google. The targeted number of people is around 1 million.
   

   
    

 

My vision is something like this

When I type Budapest Kasparov black

I should get results in a page ranking order like

First the games played by Kasparov as black in the Budapest opening

If there is a clash , then game with more commentary or recent or with higher rating… etc

 

Features which can make it a social networking site

1. Players can upload their/others games
   
2. Some functionality for commenting games(?)
   
3. Tagging of games to increase the quality of the search(?)
   

   
    

Chesslive

This is the BEST site I found till now, most of the services are free but you should be a member of USCF and some other chess federations(so, this too is not totally free). For non USCF members only limited services are available. Though it has a membership option, it fee is also modest (comparatively).
Its positive points are
1. Support for chatting with any player]
2. Seems to have active community and a form
3. Ability to participating tournaments for all players.
4. The sites design seems to be a copy of ICC but a lot more better than it.
5. Lot of strong bots to play with or test with.
6. We can challenge anyone
7. Good user interface and graphics.
8. Ad free content, revenue generated only through royal members and USCF membership fee(which we pay any way for playing in tournaments)

Negative points
1. Though it has sections named learning there is absolutely no content in them.
2. It is not intuitive and difficult to learn
3. help has content but there is a lot of scope for improvement.
4. some what old fashioned and that is quite obvious.
5. different window sections overlap creating confusion.

Comparisions of different chess web sites

I examine the following websites
1. Playchess.com
2. chessclub.com
3. yahoo & msn
4. gameknot
5. world chess network

In the following aspects
1. User interface and usability
2. ease of use for first timers and others as well
3. performance(loading times)
4. other positive and negative aspects
5. Chance for players to earn money

Online chess-

Issues in online chess playing

General Negative points

• Most of features are not free
• No correlation between actual ratings, FIDE/USCF and the system, atleast at the start most players does not want to start from scratch. In play chess though there is some provision for IM and GM, what about the rest of the strong players?
• There ability to get personal, share things, is slim.
• It does not mean all the things are only serious chess
• No distinction in user interface for Beginners and Experts
• No chance of earning real money, play chess has but the initial subscription is too high
• No blogging attached with the application itself
• Blogging can be useful for analysis, of their games, or famous games etc
• Blogging can also be useful for coaching
• Analysis is restricted only to the players of the game( no chance or intensive for other players to participate in it)
• Chess opening databases are not available
• No way to connect to the players, in their neighborhood, city, state or country. We can know only the country of the player, nothing more. I have seen players at the tournaments talking at the tournaments to speak against each other in online chess but never had I seen two players coming to a real tournament for meeting each other and playing there.
• Ultimately as a chess player, I should admit that online chess CANNOT replace the fun of live chess, so we have to make online chess as a place interest is generated and drag the players to the real tournaments.
• An association between the online tournaments and real tournaments is missing.
• Heavy chances of cheating, players can group together and play, use a computer and play, have two id's in two pc's and play to increase the rating of one ID. Two players can come to an understanding and play to increase their rating.
• New entrants always have trouble finding suitable players, their rating is provisional and aged players do not want to entertain them. They are not challenged and most of their challenges are rejected.
  

Playchess

This is the best thing around, a product of chess base, makes money through its subscriptions. Most popular for fast chess. Chess base has cool products, but they are not updating them and also nothing in them is for free, everything has to be bought, not even the basic features are free.

Positives:

1. Strongest players around
2. Multiple playing modes
3. Guest mode is good for testing and trailing or just for a break from serious chess
4. Has three kinds of ratings for slow(above 15 mins), fast and bullet(1 min)
5. Unobtrusive advertisements(of course they are only of chess base products)
6. Can watch others games
7. Largest number of players
8. Good response for feedback( i got only once, so dont count on it)
9. 
   
10. Can play from fritz 5 to fritz 9 software but even then its not free, you need a serial number to chat, to talk etc…
    
    
    
    Negatives:

1. Help is not at all useful, obsolete and has spelling mistakes.
2. No FAQ section nor any updates of problems, tips, tricks etc.
3. No way of recording all our games
4. No chance to talk with opponent, save social networking(in free version)
5. Cannot see others games which are inactive
6. Your free trails expires and you SHOULD buy a subscription to continue playing
7. Can play one game at a time(this might not be a negative point as I saw the sites which offer this feature have many other annoying problems)
8. More emphasis for dutch language than English. \
9. There is no way to solve the lag problem, when a player gets disconnected, he is dead and his game is lost. I still remember when my rating dropped 100 hundred points in consequent games due to a network problem that day. Especially in a fast game mode, seconds count
10. The opponent magically gets some extra seconds, which is insane, it says he has a lag. All this lag feature is utterly confusing because, we cant predict nor calculate it.
11. It may be the fault of the players, but serious, I mean long game chess is not found at all. When asked about the openings in the company, their reply “we have a whole team already and no real need for now.” (can anyone think that Microsoft and google does not have any whole teams?) This is kind of passivity they have. I feel they are not following the trend that one has to expand in order to survive.
12. No modern RSS feeds for important events or tournaments.
13. Though it has a tournament section its very inactive and no real incentive to win any tournament, other than applauses!!. Players will be begging, annoying other players in the main playing hall to come and play in their tournaments.
14. Everything is fast chess, it does not really improve or reflect the player's real standard, so playchess in a tragically way defeats the purpose of online chess, it is a different kind of chess and a different kind of world. ( I know players whose chess careers has to be ruined due to the addiction of fast chess).

So a distinction might be made for serious players, professional players and for fun playing.

ICC:

This is the strongest chess playing domain where I cannot survive even two days not because of the strength but cause of unintuitive user interface. Everything is a mess, I could not find even a way to play a game. I cannot comment further because, my knowledge is very limited and biased.

Only positive point I knew it has a very strong chess following and a feature called moderators (who have free year of playing) and other incentives. But you should be patient and take time to learn to get familiar with the GUI.

Here too fast chess rules.

Gameknot:

I discovered this website late, but felt it was good. Unlike other popular game playing sites this is restricted only to chess, so I felt I staying here a while. This has a different strategy of playing chess. The mode of the game is 3 day per move, (believe me!!!), it is like correspondence chess but in the modern age.

Positives:

1. The number of users is good, 5,00000 (according to wikipedia).
2. Has a strong playing community
3. The tournament section is active and people seem to have regular tournaments
4. The league section enables you to feel elated when you move from one section to the other
5. Some scope for expressing your self, you can talk while playing with the opponent, though you cannot send a private message to other players or other time.
6. Have a buddy list, with whom you can play games with or socialize.
7. The FAQ section seems good
8. Bearable user interface for the board but not as good as the playchess
9. We can know the whether our opponent has made a move through email.
10. No need of any client software.
11. No problem with lags, for a 3 day game a few seconds difference is not a concern.

Negatives

1. Very slow loading times
2. You need to refresh to see any of the players in your games have made a move. This is annoying cause you don’t need to know
3. A new player has many difficulties,
1. His rating is static to 1200.
2. He cannot play more than 6 games at first, the reason it wants to check him
3. We get a message that we can play one more game after winning 4 games but after winning it, I got the message Unable to join -- you can only start/join up to 10 games in a 3-day period, please subscribe to a premium membership to avoid this limitation.
4. Constant nagging for subscribing to premier membership. It is obtrusive
5. Meaningless advertisements and banners, ooph they can disappear with premier membership. But some what consolation is that they wont appear in the game window.
6. If a player wants to annoy you in a loosing, there is nothing that you can do. He can simply make his move in the last hour(even the last minute) and continue as usual. A king vs queen mate might take you one and a half month, too bad for chess isn’t it?
7. The players may not be coming online all the time, so the most we can hope is a 2 or 3 moves a day.

Disclaimer: All the above said are my own opinions formed by playing online chess and observations. They might be outdated or utterly wrong, or simply put I might not be knowing the ways to get around them. May be serious long games does not go with online chess itself, cause not even veteran serious chess players can stare at the boards for long hours like a tournament in a virtual environment.