Delaware Chess Weblog

Inspired by a post over on the Delaware Chess Forums by Empire1 we have not one, but two sites for you to check out! Empire1 basically asked about playing correspondence chess and the best way to do that. Email was suggested but then Phil Simpkins mentioned some online places to play turn-based chess. This inspired me to test out several sites and report back two that I think are the best.

First up is one of Phil’s suggestions, Itsyourturn.com. Itsyourturn is a very cool site to play turn-based chess.

What is turn-based chess? Turn-based chess basically means that you sign on to the site and make a move on an actual graphical board and then you go about your daily business - not like I play at work or anything. Later you sign back on and see if your opponent has moved and then take your turn again. At first I thought gee, that’s nice, but kinda boring since it will take soooo long to finish a game. Boy was I wrong! It turns out that it is very exciting and way better than playing on the chess servers (unless you feel like blasting out a number of blitz games). The beauty of this method is that you don’t feel any great pressure and you can take time to THINK about your moves. And this is exactly what you should be doing to get better at chess - playing SLOW games! It feels so good to be able to study a position, walk away for a while and come back to look at it again. Hopefully by the second or third time you will see something brilliant, but at the very least you are way less likely to make significant blunders. The other thing that keeps this method of play exciting is that you can play more than one game at once. I am currently playing twenty games at the same time. That more than makes up for the lack of instantaneous feedback from your opponent.

So now that I sold you on the potential of turn-based chess lets get back to the sites.

Itsyourturn.com has a nice clean interface and layout. Membership comes in two versions: free and a paid version at $29.95 for one year. Free membership limits the number of games you can play to twenty and the number of moves you can make in a day to fifteen. Those limits are fine for most people but if you like to play a lot of games then you will quickly become frustrated at the limits. If you enjoy playing there then it is worth the $29.95 to not have any real limits. The site also hosts tournaments and a ladder system to keep you busy. Another nice feature is that the site keeps a pgn record of your game that you can copy and paste into your computer playing program afterward for analysis. But the best part about itsyourturn.com is that it offers more games than just chess! Now, don’t get me wrong, I love chess but there are a good number of other strategy games on the site also and they are all turn-based. Games like Checkers, Backgammon, Connect4, Battleship, Stratego and Go among others. It is like the candyland of strategy games and you can play them all for free! By now you can probably see how you would run out of your daily 15 move limit - I did, many times - so now I am a member. Of course, you can also ‘chat’ with your opponent while you play, which is a nice way to meet new people and make new friends across the nation and world.

What is the downside of itsyourturn.com? Well, for starters, the limits on games and moves. The other issue is the interface. While it is clean and easy and requires no special software (flash, java etc…) it is mildly annoying. Each time you click on a piece to move it you have to wait for the page to reload and then click on the square you want it to go to and the page reloads again. It is generally quite fast but annoying none-the-less. The other issue is with the chat function. You can associate a message with a move. The problem is that it is hard to remember what you said the last time (remember, you may be playing many games at once) and it is time consuming to get back to each message. But the truth is that these are minor annoyances for a very cool site that can give you much enjoyment and improve your chess. I highly recommend you check it out!

The second site? Well, this review turned out a little longer than I thought so I am going to save that for next time That will also give you a chance to check out itsyourturn for free and get a feel for the site so you will better be able to compare. So go on over to itsyourturn.com and play some games - but don’t pay quite yet until you see the other site I am recommending. It’ll be soon, really.

Until next time….

Tom Fleetwood

The Corus Chess Tournament has started and consists of many of the top players in the world. You can watch the games online at http://www.coruschess.com/. Of course, the chess servers such as Chesslive, Playchess, and the ICC relay the games and include audio commentary. So if you are a member of any of those servers I highly recommend tuning in to the audio to learn how these great players think and see wonderful game analysis!

Wishing everyone the very best over this holiday season and throughout the new year.

Happy New Year to all!