Any Chess players here ?

[VR46]

Didn't play for about 15 years until about a fortnight ago and have really got back into the great game. I'm no Kasparov or anything, and don't have anyone at home to play against so looking for some recommendations on sites where you can play online against human opponents, or even computer opponents, or am I just better off buying something like latest version of Chessmaster ?

Thanks.

[Ajay1986]

I play alot of chess on yahoo games mainly with one of my friends unfortunatly he's really good so i get whooped. If you'd like a game PM me and we can arrange it Yahoo's version is the best ive played on the net.

[VR46]

will check it out and get back to you, thanks.

[MartyG]

http://www.interchess.co.uk/ - written by an ex-colleague of mine has a very big community, or at least use to. The engine hasn't been updated since 2001, but it might be worth a look - it's sends moves via email (it's all automated both outgoing and incoming), which means you can play games over hours, weeks or months, you just find an opponent with the same time frame as yourself.

I use to play chess a lot when I was at school, most lunch times as GameBoys weren't available then :P I must admit my game has gone very much downhill since then, and I'm beaten by most AI engines these days far too easily.

There's another Interchess here: http://www.marpe.org/InterChess.asp - looks like this is a peer-to-peer setup.

[Bassman]

I haven't played chess since my Sinclair Spectrum days as I had a number of chess games on that platform (which could beat me at the higher levels). At work it used to Bridge at lunchtime.

[VR46]

thanks for links Marty, I've signed up with www.letsplaychess.com for now, again play online but get "your move" emails when it's your go. It's free (well except for advanced stats) and very user friendly, lots of players from all skill levels.

[MartyG]

The only thing that I've found with the online stuff (as with pretty much all online stuff I guess), that you can often find yourself still playing computer AI (your opponent puts your moves into Chessmaster and the computer response is returned). Very little you can do to stop it.

So long as you find the right community and opponent it'd be fine, and that link looks promising, but playing face to face, at least you can see when someone is cheating

[charlaph]

I use winboard, but only tend to play online against friends I know, not part of an overall community. There's a wealth of great offline engines still available for it as well. Great stuff.

[Ish]

I've not played for years - not since school - but I used to love playing. I was never much good though.

Still if you fancy a game David I've registered with the same site. My username there is Ish_007. You can start your new chess career my giving me a sound whipping. Errr...

[Ish]

Thsi thread coupled with someone pulling a chess board out at work one lunchtime about the same time as the original post as got me seriously back into my chess.

I've got about 20 online games at the moment. Fantastic. So simple, yet so complex. A beautiful game