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Chessmaster has been mentioned, as far as I know all versions now have online play.

The ICC has also been mentioned, membership is half price for students

You might also want to look into:

FICS Free Internet Chess Server

http://www.freechess.org/

They've got a Java app for interfacing but there's non-Java ones as well like Eboard or Xboard. Eboard and Xboard will also act as graphical frontends for GnuChess/Crafty (and you can use them with ICC too)

I don't think it would not hard to port a FICS client to J2ME (its one of the little projects I have on the "prob. never get round to doing"-ToDo list). But at £x per kb, it will not be a cheep game.

They still do. People with accounts at FICS or ICC and you can choose to be notified when a buddy signs on.

I'd call that prior art.

A while ago I played a little bit on FICS and I found some of the language used by players to be disturbing. A small fraction was very racist and a much larger fraction was very anti-US.

Then again I think chess drives some people nuts. ie Bobby Fischer.

FICS is not dead. ICC does have its advantages over a free server though (and even more over one you run yourself) - GM games/lectures, prize tournaments, an expert anti-computer-cheating team etc.

A better place is freechess.org. I suggest using the Thief interface, especially for bughouse games. There are about 10 times more people on there playing bug than on ICC. Don't know about normal chess, but I've seen quite a few GM's on there. Played a couple too(it's not fun).

FICS is better than ICC anway. FICS is free. ICC makes you pay.

How will the open source chess engine Crafty do against the proprietary closed engines?

I'd check out some of the action if I didn't have to use playchess.com's proprietary closed client software to do so...

It seems this guy is attempting to patent what was previously implemented in the IGS, the NNGS, and numerous online chess servers.

It seems odd to me that it didn't occur to Mr. Goldberg that some else had probably done most of what his patents claimed before 1998. Online play, complete with subscription fees, ranking systems, and player configuration dates back to the Eighties.

not sure if this is off-topic...mod me thus if you must.

I play free internet chess at the Free Internet Chess Server. Find them at...you guessed it: www.freechess.org.

All you CLI guys out there will love the fact that using a graphical client is optional! For those of us who are sane, there are a handful of graphical boards available to complement the irc-ish interface that allows people to find opponents.

It's fairly popular already, but I sure wouldn't mind a bigger crowd...cause all the guys on there kick my arse consistently. I've got a whopping 1300-something rating right now, and I'm already 0-3 for the night...sheesh.

peace.

I dunno, i'm nothing special, (989 Blitz elo on FICS), but I could do something special with Deep Junior's opening book at a tournament. Considering the fact that I can make the first few moves of a chess game without human prodding to make any specific one, I think my abilities far outstrip DJ's. I mean really, computers still can't even play chess yet, and it's doubtful they ever will be able to do anything more masterful than DJ's greek gift sacrifice for a draw out of nowhere in game 5, which was indeed impressive.

FICS has had a few chess variants for a while, like suicide and bughouse. It also uses timeseal, which some (unnamed) online game playing systems STILL don't use to combat lag. They also have live broadcast of chess events (Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, with comments by grandmasters and analysis by chess computers) and a new "teaching ladder". Good stuff.
http://www.freechess.org.

Can anyone suggest some good chess strategy books?

"How to reassess your chess" by Jeremy Silman is probably the most-recommended chess strategy book, but it's not for beginners, more for somewhat advanced club players. A cheap, all-round good book to start with may be "The Mammoth Book of Chess", by Burgess and Nunn. Go to Amazon for reviews by people and sample pages, they're good for that sort of thing.

Of course there are always the game sites the offer chess online.

The best for Slashdot geeks should be FICS, at http://www.freechess.org, with its command line interface and geeky audience (usually 400+ players online). The best Linux client to play there is eboard.

Incidentally, SCID is a *great* GPL'ed chess database, originally for Linux but also ported to Windows, that makes Chessbase obsolete as far as I'm concerned.

There's some pretty open source good chess software out there:

-Tim Mann's winboard (GUI, mentioned in other post)

-If you have winboard and want to try something besides GNUchess, the most popular engine for the GUI: crafty, by Robert Hyatt. Not anywhere as user-friendly as something like Chessmaster, but a great engine. Er, and I'm not sure this has an actual open source license or if it's merely free as in beer.

-connect to an open source chess server, the Free Internet Chess server; use Winboard as an interface and play internet chess with players from around the world

-organize your game scores or study those of the greats with Shane Hudson's SCID chess database. Search the database by player name, Elo rating, openings, etc. This is an incredible program, usable, fast, and stable!

This "interview" is pretty self serving for ChessBase GmBh and Frederick Friedel, it's principal. It basically is structured around the theme of legitmizing Fritz as the leading chess engine (over Deep Blue - which has since been disassembled) with a bit of fluff on chess politics thrown in. Sigh - well, I guess it sells more copies of Fritz v7

Check out chess interfaces eboard for gnome and knights for KDE. And don't forget to play on FICS

Right now, the world's best crazyhouse (aka drop-chess aka chessgi, due to the resemblance to shogi) players almost all play most of their games on the Free Internet Chess Server. The best computer right now goes by the handle "sregorg", which is Sunsetter running on a 1.5GHz P4. It has occupied one of the top few positions on the ranking list for several months now, and it plays 3-5 minute games (by far the most popular) at or above the same level as the best players. I currently am #14 in the rankings, and given our relative ratings, sregorg has an expectation of about 80% wins against me. In practice, I have 20 wins and 86 losses. The results of the current top 5 humans vs sregorg are as follows: 0-1, 13-22, 101-256-11, 13-32, 28-72. A now-inactive former #1 player has an 11-11 record, though. So, the computers have improved.

There are a number of free alternatives of course.

Don't assume just because these systems can only push resolutions around 30x40 that they can't be used to do some pretty creative things. Chess? Checkers? Anyone here check out FICS lately? Sure, the graphics are the computer equivalent of a five dollar travel set.. people still buy 5$ magnetic travel sets for a reason. If the game is fun, the graphics are secondary. -GiH

I've played chess very occasionally on freechess.org. If you monitor the main forum, you'll see bots occasionally announcing that they will be starting a lecture in a few minutes, whether it be on endgame technique or a particular notable historical game. The ones I've seen seem to last in the neighborhood of an hour, though I've never actually "attended" any.

This seems like it is merely Microsoft trying to get something to use their Passport systeme, since they cannot seem to sell it to any major service people are using. We should simply ignore their silly publicity tricks.

I am addicted to a couple of things and one of them is Games, although i am less addicted since i started using Unix only, but still freeciv and freechess are a bit addictive...and the 4 years a kept playing the massive multiplayer games like Ultima Online and Planetarion before where pretty hefty addictive....
and there for it was my Atari-ST for which had about a 1000 floppy disks with games on it...and some other stuff ofcourse :)
But after all i learned how to use computers pretty well, i learned some programming and wrote a Arkanoid version once and now i have had some Sysadmin jobs and now i am Programmer or so they say, i still lack good hacking skillz...

Still i think my game addiction wasnt really bad for me, only it made me forget there was a real world out there although i dont really lack social skills, i have a handfull of friends and i go out to the pub since i was 14 and i still do now when i am 22...i have a girlfriend...so life seems pretty oke...still i live in a fantasy world, but i dont think thats cause of the games....

Now i am addicted to more things like IRC, Smoking and Sex...
I learned a lot of nice people tru IRC which are really very nice,
IRC also keeps me from doing my work at 100% cause i can use it at my work ;P
Smoking yes is a bad habbit i guess....and Sex well figure....

Overall aslong an addiction doesnt harm you in the real world around you and you can live a life you want to everything is great....

Quazion.

This wheel is already invented. freechess.org has enabled (human|computer) vs (human|computer) chess over the internet since 1995. Their now commercial parent chessclub.com started in 1992. They sometimes have tournaments for homemade chess programs. Tim Mann's XBoard/Zippy is a nice stable client if you want a GUI for your brainchild; RoboFICS is good if you don't.

Someone on freechess.org usually sets up a mirror game for people to observe when there's a human championship. Maybe they'll do the same for the computer championship.

There have been many, many, many variations on chess created in the last century; the reason you've never heard of them is that chess players view them as a curiosity and distraction, but not as anything useful.

No, the reason you've never heard about them is you haven't been listening. First of all, chess itself is a variant. Likely the original "chess" was what we now call Chaturanga, which dates back to 7th century India. This evolved, as variants continually cropped and died out, but occasionally replaced chess itself. Soon Chaturanga became Shatranj, and so on. Rules were changed or added, one by one. Pawns became able to move two spaces instead of one on their first move. En passant was introduced. Castling began as well. The Indian pieces were replaced with European medieval figure representations. And so forth.

But it doesn't stop at historical variants... there are literally thousands of chess variants played regularly around the world. You can find many in the wonderful book The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants or on The Chess Variant Pages. Many variants can be played online at chess servers like The Free Internet Chess Server (telnet freechess.org 5000), The Middle East Wild Internet Server (telnet chess.mds.mdh.se 5555), The Internet Chess Club, etc.

Chess Variants I have played and enjoy:
Standard, Blitz, Lightning, Quantum, Hourglass, Bughouse, 3 Board Bughouse, 4 Board Bughouse, 5 Board Bughouse, Aerial Bughouse, Crazyhouse, Suicide, Atomic, Wild 5, Wild 10, Kriegspiel, Progressive, Magnetic, Fairy Tale, Alice, Fischer Random, Random, Thai, Shogi, Xiangqi, 3 Player Chess, 4 Player Chess, Cylindrical, Infinite, Capablanca's, Mutation, Absorption, Inverse Capture, Rifle, Kamikaze, Extinction, Take-All, Rotation, Marseillais, Stealth, Hostage, Insane, Ultima and Command.

Many of these variants were created by world class chess players to add another dimension to the game. For example, Fischer Random was invented by Bobby Fischer to eliminate opennings from the game. Capablanca created Capablanca's Chess. The list goes on and on.

My all time favorite chess variant is bughouse, wherein you have two boards side by side and a partner who plays the opposite color from you... you pass your partner the pieces you capture and he does likewise, then as your move you may place one of these pieces on the board instead of playing a normal move with the pieces already on the board. It is a very social game and is much more fun than chess itself.

Check out my webpage for more information on variants, chess servers, and other chess stuff: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~cem9314/chess/.

While the general opinion in the chess world has been in agreement with the fact that Kasparov vs the World wasn't a "real" chess match, it is a somewhat irrelevant point. "Real" chess is a game played by two humans, with no assistance. This was intended, rather, as a corporate sponsored exhibition. The idea is to draw more attention to the game. And I'm glad MS messed it up, that just brings MORE publicity. Which is all that the chess world has to gain from corporations anyhow.

But if you're looking for real chess without the corporate infuences, go to the Free Internet Chess Server

This seems like a great time to plug FICS. (Free Internet Chess server). I have played "team games" there, which is somewhat similar, but on a much much smaller scale. I'm talking about games like 3 on 3 here. It was nice because we had some others to bounce of ideas.. Then again, we had a focused discussion. Not something the "world" can do very easily.

But one thing you really could do to help the free software cause, is to release sanitized logs (without actual IP, user names, etc...) of most components (apache server, SQL requests, TCP/IP connections...), for the free software community (and even the research community) could understand what are the real issues on a real loaded Linux server.

Because without understanding what are the performance issues, how could other Open Source people know how to optimize their code ? I'm thinking of the SQL servers, perl, and Linux kernel. How can they know whether there is, say, a 'select', a TCP/IP or a context switching performance problem ... ? They couldn't. They have to rely on ad-hoc benchmarks, that might lead wrong design decisions.

Maybe other sites could do that (we could even have a Free Performance Monitoring Log Fundation :-) ), but slashdot as evolved to be one of the most quoted and visited sites. And it seems to have performance issues, so it is perfect for monitoring: that way people could simulate one day of slashdot on there favorite hardware/OS/server/database. Bottlenecks could be founds. Differences between Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Digital Unix, Windows NT, whatever..., could be highlited and even corrected.

I know it has little relevance, but I'll be very surprised if the people at Redmond, non matter how lame they are believed to be (or maybe are), were sitting on their hands idling, while they have too one of the most visited WWW sites. I'll be very surprised if they weren't constantly tuning and improving the code of their server, especially considering the importance of WWW servers and the fact that IIS has less "marketshare" then Apache.

Please :-)