Monday, November 5, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.18 - Play for free

The most famous chess web sites hardly allow a player to play for free (unless you are a very famous chess player, in that case you are very welcome to join). Important chess servers’ access is not free but you can try for free for one week only. Others require a free registration with limited features and a premium registration with prices per month, 3 months, 6 months and per year. Premium memberships are full options in this case but there is a saving for long term registration.


Figure 14 – http://www.chesscube.com premium membership fees


Another policy is to have different premium memberships from the lowest level one with some features only to the highest level with full features.


Figure 15 – http://www.gameknot.com premium membership fees


Usually free registration limitations are on

  • the number of games playable at the same time or in a day, 
  • the possibility to access tournaments, 
  • the number of game archived is limited, 
  • computer analysis is not allowed, 
  • play in teams is not allowed, 
  • very basic statistics, colors and pieces customization are not allowed, just to mention a few.

Other providers who ask money as well to all the members offer an “exploration” mode in which the user can play for free for a limited amount of time or games. Expired this period they are invited to pay the fee for the next games.
Talking about money, some web sites allow playing with money (both symbolic and real). I understand that could be attractive for someone but I believe playing a game gives other immaterial earnings.



Saturday, November 3, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.17 - Other stuff

Playing chess on-line attracts several people, from the field and not. So it is not surprising that a web site providing the possibility to play has a store of chess material (boards, chess pieces, chess clocks, magazines, books, training material like videos, collection of games and so on). Another interesting feature to attract people mad of chess is chess puzzles. You are asked to solve the problem of the day typically. Sometimes the web site holds news from the chess world, tournaments, top players events, chess social events or international events with video, photos and articles. What about people who are not close to chess world? They want to find only an opponent to defeat or to chat with, the rest is useless…but is nice to have for the chess community.

On-line Chess - Part 1.16 - Population

It is very annoying to log-in, create a game and wait plenty of time because no one else in connected. Some popular web sites are full of people ready to play so that you don’t have to wait more that few second to find an opponent. Some other is completely unknown or less popular and the risk is to waste your time. There are some interesting web sites still unknown that are worth playing at, so I don’t want to give the advice to leave them empty. On the contrary I want to foster visiting those web sites, try and let them take off, especially if they are free!

Thursday, November 1, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.15 - Graphics

Beauty is a subjective parameter during the evaluation of a web site. What does it mean? When you play chess at home or in a chess club it doesn’t matter if the board is made of cardboard and the pieces are made of plastic. What’s really matter is the game, the battle and who will win. Is it really true? If you have the chance to chose between a cardboard chess board and a wooden board with sheesham chessmen, which one will you chose? Now, back to the on-line chess. There are a lot of chess pieces pictures on the web and the game providers let their user to choose between different styles, colors and dimension of both sets and board squares. Sometimes the number of possibilities is limited if the subscription is free while if you pay for a premium subscription the choice is greater.


Figure 13 - Graphic interface Come2Play from www.come2play.com

Chessboard and sets are not the only graphic parameter to judge. Font is another parameter. Sometimes the font is too small or the text components in the web page are too close, or on the page there are fonts of different kind. If the web page contains too much information with small font together with bigger and different font, it could be difficult to find the information you need.

Anyway the beauty is subjective. Someone prefers simplicity: few things but very good.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.14 - Play everywher

Nowadays computers are not the only mean to reach internet. Cell phones, smart phones, iPhone, iPod, Wii and so on have access to internet. Big online chess providers know about this revolution and adapted their web sites to be reached from those devices. The cost is high for the provider and so it is difficult to find this feature for free. Typically there is an application to download on your portable device which is the client program. Even if the download is free, if you want to play often or affect your rating you should pay a fee.


Figure 12 – iPhone application provided by http://www.chess.com

Furthermore social networks counts thousands of people and give the possibility for developers to public their software to be used by social networks’ users. So if you want to play chess online you surely will find a way!

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.13 - Security

On a real chess game it is not possible to cheat. Online chess games instead can be cheated in several ways depending of the security model implemented. Yah, the server receives the information about the move and the timestamp from the clients. Nobody is able to see what the user is doing sitting in front of his/her PC. Let’s start from the most common cheating type: the computer aid. Instead of using their own brain, cheaters open a window on their PC where their favorite chess program is running. The position of the game in progress is replicated in the chess program and analyzed by the CPU (which will do the dirty job), the program hints the best move for every position and unlucky opponents can be defeated soon if not stronger than the machine. The consequence is that cheaters gain points rapidly and they will be at the top of the ladder even if not deserved. Is there a remedy for that? Some online game providers claim they have one. The principle is that suspicious games are analyzed with a computer engine and if there is a match that is the footprint of a cheat. Can anyone be sure 100% that it is a cheat? Difficult to say. Anyway other techniques can be added and the following three are just examples:
  • The rating evolution is monitored because a quick rising of the rating is a symptom of good game but also of cheating. 
  • The suspect cheater is notified by a message encouraging him/her to stop cheating or simply informing that from now on a strict monitoring will be performed on his/her games. 
  • The suspect cheater is marked so that every user knows what could happen if they accept a challenge from a suspect cheater. 
  • The number of times the game is suspended is monitored. It could be an indication that the player is using the time to query a chess program.
When the cheater is confirmed he/she is banned from using the chess service.
Another popular way to gain points is to play against yourself. Cheaters create two accounts and winning against themselves let them improve their rating. Some game providers overcome this techniques by force the users at registration time to accept to not create more than one account otherwise they will be banned. Some other game providers instead have tools to detect if the players of a game come from the same IP address. What if the cheater uses two different PC?
  Another historical way to cheat an opponent is to interrupt the game when thing is going bad on the board. Let’s think the case there is a temporary connection failure of a client. Some game providers simply null the game because they think it is unfair to assign a result in this case. But cheaters could turn off their computer in order to simulate an internet connection failure. Usually providers face this problem in two ways:
  • adjourning the game when accidental disconnection has happened and give the chance to reconnect in order to complete the game 
  • declaring the victory for the player remained online
Other providers claim they have an intelligent system able to recognize abusive game interruptions, which is the best solution to the problem.
Now let’s have a look at complex cheating techniques. As we already said, the client program sends a time stamp together with the move up to the server. Time stamp could be modified to get more time. Usually the connection between the client and the server is encrypted but even the most famous chess server (ICC) has not a strong protection against hackers that could decrypt the message and change the time stamp.

Monday, October 29, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.12 - Customizations

As a user of the game service you have the chance to customize the interface you use to play. Type of chess pieces and colors of white and dark squares of the board are examples of personal settings.
 Figure 11www.chess.com board settings

Another common one is the automatic pawn promotion to queen. Even if sometimes there are not so many choices this features in nice to have. The move highlight is useful when you want to see quickly what the opponent move is when you come back to your monitor. Other minor settings are the movement of the piece when you move or the alert sounds.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.11 - Analysis

Your games are stored in a database so they are available to all people to inspect and comment. Analyzing games is useful for improvements and on-line gaming providers allow their users to have this feature. How? In several ways. First of all the user can post the game to a forum and wait for someone to review and comment. Simple and effective, because when a lot of people could analyze your game and so the amount of data produced could be very interesting, with no cost for the provider. The drawback is that it could happen no one wants to review your game or the reviewers are not good enough. Sometimes there is a committee entitled for reviewing the games when required. In this case the guys in the committee should be prepared enough for producing good quality comments. Another scenario is the help of a computer program. Your game is put in queue and it will wait to be processed by a chess engine. This solution has a cost in terms of hardware resources to guarantee the service to every user, while the chess engine could be open Source. Other commercial chess engines, like Fritz for instance, perform better analysis so someone prefers to download the PGN format of the game and run his/her favorite chess engine for a deep analysis.

Analysis is good for training but is lesser amusing than reviewing the game with your opponent at the end of a match, still in front of the chessboard with the clock still warm. Ok, the quality of the analysis is poor but you still have your variants in your mind and would like to see the reaction of the opponent.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.10 - Game archive and statistics

A good player takes note of the move list of his/her games in order to analyze later and improve from mistakes. No piece of paper is required when you play on-line chess because the system takes note of the game moves and save the game in the Portable Game Notation format in a database. That’s really useful. Database access makes it easy to query for a match against an opponent or for a game played years ago. You can then review the game using your client program or download the PGN file and open it using your favorite computer chess program in order to let it analyze deeply the game and find the mistakes and good moves. Game archive has a cost for providers of the gaming service (disk space is not for free), for this reason usually if you want to store all your games you have to pay while free subscription have limited storage size.
Figure 10 – www.geekswithchess.com game archive

Another possibility is to upload games in PGN format on the database. Even if they are not played using the provider service, this is a way to collect the games you want on the net so they become available everywhere an internet connection is available.
Statistics are another interesting feature. In the basic form statistics report the number of games played, won, drawn and lost. Advanced forms could report your rating evolution over time or the statistics on openings used in your games and several ways to present the data graphically. Any means to show you how strong you are is appreciated.

On-line Chess - Part 1.9 - Games watching

If you ever entered a chess club, for sure you have stop by a table watching a game in progress. Observing a game in progress just like a real spectator is possible also on-line. Typically there is a list of ongoing games and you can join to watch one of them. Some time you are allowed to write down messages into the local chat.
Figure 9www.chess.com game view panel

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Welcome Mind The Check!



Mind The Check is the new web site for playing online chess for free. it offers the chance to play correspondence chess (turn based chess) and live chess(time based chess), rated and unrated games, gives the players the opportunity to check their progress in term of strength and look at their own games whenever they want.

The site is online for some time but it unveils itself only recently to the web community, thanks to its latest stable version that makes use of cutting-edge software technologies as JSF2.0 and Atmosphere Framework.

The project was created by combining the need to renew competence and the curiosity for some emerging technologies, finding in an old interest in the Game of Chess, a breeding ground for this activity. By the time the project has grown, maintaining the same spirit and gaining expertise everytime an obstacle got passed,  opening the door to new ideas and new challenges.

Mind The Check is constantly evolving, so many ideas still have to be realized, but it is now ready to be known and it is open to any advice or suggestions that can make the chess player life on the virtual chess board easier or just more interesting.

Good game!

Sunday, September 30, 2012

On-line Chess - Part 1.8 - Other play possibilities

Usually you are not allowed to play more than one game at a time mainly for security as we will see later. That’s not true for all the gaming sites.
But let’s go back to the rating concept. You can play against anyone and increase your rating, very easy. Too easy maybe: in the real world to increase your rating you should participate to official tournaments. For this reason it is very common to find tournaments on-line. Tournaments start when a certain number of people join the tournament which is scheduled at a fixed time and publicized on the site.
Tournaments could be of various types:
  • In round-robin tournaments each player plays against every other player in two games (once as white, once as black). The winner is determined by the score but when two players have the same score a tie-break method can be used. The tie-break method widely used for this kind of tournament is the Neustadtl score. A player's Neustadtl score is calculated by adding the sum of the conventional scores of the players they have defeated to half the sum of the conventional scores of those they have drawn against. Round-robin tournaments are simple but they are effective only when the number of players is limited to few users.
  • Knock-out tournaments are used when there are a lot of players in order to reduce the time taken by the competition. Players are put into smaller groups and then the winner(s) of that group are combined with winners of other groups to form a new group. The winner(s) of the final group are the winner(s) of the entire tournament. One or more players could advance from each group. If one only has to advance, a tie-break method is used.
  • A Swiss tournament goes for a predetermined number of rounds, with all of the players taking part in each round. In each round two players compete head-to-head. All players participate in the entire tournament – none are eliminated. The winner (and top places) of the tournament is based on the final scores of the players. The final score is based on the number of points they accumulated for each round. The tournament lasts for a number of rounds announced before the tournament. After the last round, players are ranked by their score. If this is tied then a tie break score, such as the sum of all their opponents' scores (Buchholz chess rating), can be used. The Buchholz System is in fact the sum of the score of each of the opponents of a player. 
 
When the users of a web site are quite a number, it is common to find teams of players playing against. Not a one-to-one challenge but a many-to-many challenge. The team wins if the score of its members is higher than other teams after the fight. Team members become friends, they exchange information trough dedicated chat.
Also teams can compete in tournaments. In this case the rating is different.
Some game providers allow users to play different chess variants and gain rating also for those games. The most popular chess variants you can find are
  • Chess 960
  • Reverse (suicide chess)
  • Checkers
  • Bughouse