Choosing an Online Chess Site: ICC
October 4, 2010
Tags: Learning Chess Articles, Teaching Chess Articles
Written by guest author Jason Repa for Wholesale Chess
In the early days of the public internet, there were few choices for those seeking to play chess in cyber space. On top of this, you had to contend with slow response times, crude graphics, and a limited number of prospective opponents. Live, or what is referred to in chess vernacular as over-the-board (otb) chess, was still very much alive and well as many chess aficionados didn’t want to make such concessions.
Today there are many dozens, if not hundreds, of chess servers, sometimes with tens of thousands of users logged on at once, offering everything from turn-based email chess, in which players may take days, or even weeks, to make a single move, to nerve-wracking bullet chess, where all of your moves must be made within a minute or two. In addition to that, some sites also offer chess variants in which the rules and objectives of normal chess are modified in order to provide a refreshing new challenge whilst the general flavour of classical chess is still present. There is a wide variety of offerings and the quality of the interface functionality and resolution at some servers is so high that many players have opted for online chess instead of attending in person at their local club. At least in North America, attendance at tournaments has dropped almost across the board, compared to the days just prior to online play.
For the real time servers, my personal pick is ICC.
ICC has been around the longest and it shows. They charge about $70 USD for a year membership, but offer a 2 week free trial. When first becoming a member at ICC, you are prompted to download their client software which enables you to play chess on their servers. You may chose between a fully-featured graphical client, named Dasher, and their latest incarnation of telnet client, named Blitzin. The telnet client is less user-friendly but enables advanced users to perform quicker command inputs. Both clients provide customizable chess boards which are at a resolution that is easy on the eyes. ICC provides a rich community experience with everything from popular chat rooms, categorized by nation or interest, to tournaments and chess training lectures, as well as their popular ChessFM broadcast which features Grandmaster colour commentary and analysis during major international tournaments and matches, along with chess trivia where prizes are awarded. They also host the largest number of chess variants, such as shuffle chess, loser’s chess, atomic, three-checks, etc, for those who want a change from classical chess. These variants can be very addicting and now have a large following of regular players.
My only criticism of ICC is their lack of coordination with an offline chess client for offline study and analysis, such as is the case with Playchess.com and their Chessbase and Fritz software. Non computer savvy folks might find it daunting to have to locate then import their ICC games into a database.
More reviews from Jason: Playchess.com and Yahoo Chess.
Jason Repa is a CFC rated national chess expert and part-time chess coach from Winnipeg, Canada. He has been a tournament chess player since 1995 and has been teaching chess since 2002. He can be reached at jasonrepa @ hotmail.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Wholesale Chess. We welcome open discussion on all aspects of chess on the Wholesale Chess Blog. If you would like to be a guest author on our blog, please contact us at marketing@wholesalechess.com.
October 5th, 2010 at 9:05 am
This is sort of informative but not very balanced… It could have been better titled “Jason plays at ICC.” If you’re not going to name even one online server that is *entirely* online – requiring no download/installs – or which *isn’t* bar none the most expensive membership out there, you should at least detail why ICC is far and away superior to the unmentionables.
Readers may be interested to know that they can play all the correspondence-style and real-time chess games they want for free and with no downloads at a number of different sites, including my fave, Chess.com.
October 6th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Actually, ‘Michael’, you are incorrect, and on several counts. And your post has a very single-minded and hostile tone, so it’s no surprise you don’t identify yourself with a last name, if indeed you’re even giving your real first name. It certainly smacks of a sales pitch for chess.com as you don’t favorably mention any other sites.
For starters, I’ve played at playchess.com for far longer than I have at ICC. I have no affiliation whatsoever with ICC, or any other chess server, and I don’t appreciate your presumptuous insinuation that I am biased. I am 100% objective regarding my comments comparing the different chess servers. And I did indeed give details as to why I feel that ICC is the best. I gave numerous details. It is you in fact, who gives no such detail for the site that you are promoting, other than to say it requires no downloads, and mistakenly refer to it as being free when it most certainly is not.
Secondly, this article is not about correspondence chess, it’s about real-time chess, as the boldface line “For the real time servers, my personal pick is ICC.” should have made obvious to you. Most correspondence servers don’t require a download. Most real-time servers do. My discussion about which correspondence server I recommend will be in a future article. In any event, there is nothing wrong with downloading a software client. Of the many benefits of downloading a client, such as superior interface functionality and quality, there is also enhanced security to help ensure a fair and honest gaming experience. Servers like ICC and playchess.com take measures to prevent computer assistance, which are only possible through the use of a downloaded client.
Thirdly, I haven’t recommended a real-time chess server that doesn’t require a downloaded client because, quite frankly, none of them are worthy of mention. I’m well aware of chess.com and their relatively recent addition of real-time chess. It’s possibly the worst place to play real-time chess that I can think of. The server is highly buggy, the interface is choppy, and the number of players is a tiny fraction of that of the servers I recommended. I couldn’t see anyone promoting it unless they are involved with it and stand to make money by trying to attract new members.
I’ve had a membership at chess.com. I quickly got my bullet rating up to the 2150+ range and when I tried to find a game with an opponent at least 1800+ I was out of luck. The seek graph revealed a few players around the 1100-1300 range, but nobody even coming close to meeting my 1800+ minimum requirement. After about a 20 minute wait, a 1900 player finally showed up, lol. Even Yahoo, which is free and which doesn’t constantly pester you to play, lest you are not allowed to use certain features, as chess.com does, has many more players at the higher ratings. At least 10 fold compared to chess.com
But the thing I dislike most about chess.com are their unsavory tactics to try to get money from people. They lie to you and claim that it’s free, but then after they get your email address for their sales spam lists and convince you to register an account, their true intentions come out. During the registration process you are ‘encouraged’ to give them the email addresses of five of your friends, so that they can spam them too! In the main chat room, non-paying members are only allowed to say something every 30 seconds. To my knowledge this is the only chess room to institute such a ridiculous policy. You are even restricted as to what types of interface board you can choose if you don’t hand over your money to them. The “premium” boards cost money. There are various other restrictions for non-paying members as well. On top of this they constantly try to herd you into paying with annoying messages that instruct you how to pay and provide a link to do so every time you try to do something that only paid members are allowed to do. At least with ICC, when they give you a free trial, it’s a REAL free trial and you have 100% identical functionality to that of paid members for the full duration of your trial.
Also, your comment that ICC is the most expensive membership out there is absurd. They are in fact significantly cheaper than chess.com. ICC wants $70/year, chess.com is more than $95/year, or $12.99/month.
My second choice for a free server, that really is free, would be FICS. The only reason I put them second to Yahoo is because of the lower number of players and learning curve required to use the various interfaces. They are a close second though. Chess.com wouldn’t even make my top 20 list.
October 17th, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Jason is right here, except I dont like the java client for mac OS on icc, but then again thats a comment Im making with no investigation/time spent whatsoever on finding alternative clients
October 18th, 2010 at 11:40 am
@ Michael – We’d love to hear your angle on correspondence-style and real-time chess games at Chess.com. If you’re interested in writing an article for Wholesale Chess, please email us at marketing@wholesalechess.com.
November 13th, 2010 at 11:07 am
Actually I’ll have to go with Michael, whatever is real name is… I am a member at playchess.com, chess.com and chesscube. For a while I thought of joining ICC but the interface, how much I tweaked it, remained just too ugly, with a sort of windows 95 feel that did not bode well for the rest IMO.
Also you can play for free on every site I mentionned while as far as I know on ICC you only get a trial (but I may be wrong). I cannot say that I remember being pressed for upgrading my account on chess.com (I did for the three I mentionned and only chesscube I won’t renew since the place is full of cheaters).
As for your bullet problem, I take your word for it, since I do not play live chess much (and must confess I have no interest in playing bullet).
Still IMO the best place to play live chess remains chessbase’s playchess, especially since they recently changed the free interface (also you get a year premium membership when you buy fritz 12).