Chess Players on GFY?
 

Anyone? I play online at FICS (free internet chess server) which is the best place short of ICC (internet chess club) which costs about $50 a year last I remember. ICC is real nice because all the grandmasters play there, so you can watch them play, also lots of lectures and stuff. But whatever there's always lots of people that can kick my ass at FICS so why bother paying.

I use this client for PC: http://www.babaschess.net/
The best Mac client is: http://www.jinchess.com/

My nick is SocksManly if you'd like to play, once you sign up you can add me to your notify list with the command: +notify socksmanly

To look for a game you type: seek 5 0 (5 minutes, 0 second increment)

I play mostly lightning 1 0 nowadays, 1 minute per side.

I'm decent I guess, nothing special. Hope to see some of you there. :)

Used to play all the time, but don't get time these days.

If you have time for GFY you have time for some 1 0 !

I don't play 90 minute/side games locally anymore, but I find Chess is great for taking small breaks at the PC. Instead of getting lost for hours doing something else, I can play a few quick games and get back to doing stuff. Also it's great while waiting for something to finish, like a long copy or a video encode or whatever. Play a quick game and then check back on what you were doing.

Lately I have been using a chess app that gave a ridicules rating of +1980 which I believe is a Grandmasters rating (which i am not) I was on chess.com for a while.
Maybe I should try this but it's all about time zones, aren't you EST?

Fuck I am garbage at Chess. I guess I just need to put more time in. I love strategy gaming, but I just blow fucking nuts at Chess. Tried to get into it a few month back and was playing once in a while on Yahoo Games, but getting your ass handed to you repeatedly gets old fast.

I am ranked #38 out of like 100,000 active Carcasonne players on Xbox Live though. I'm sitting at #12 on the weekly rankings right now. If you feel like some Carcasonne, I'll take your ass. I have like an 86% win record at that shit. lol. Pushing around a 68% record on 3-player Catan, which isn't too shabby, but there's no leaderboards for it.

I wouldn't break the top 5mil in Chess, lol...

1980 is a very strong player. 2000 is about master level, 2200 is about IM (international master) level, and ~2300+ is GM level. Top players in the world are 2700-2800.

Top 3 right now:

Rank Name Title Country Rating Games B-Year
1 Anand, Viswanathan g IND 2817 13 1969
2 Carlsen, Magnus g NOR 2815 13 1990 <--- 21 years old!!
3 Aronian, Levon g ARM 2808 13 1982

I am in EST, but there's always lots of people on, and I stay up late :)

learn a few easy openings and piece development and you will be kicking ass too!

Thanks for the offer, it would be nice, but I can justify coming to GFY as it increases my earnings and learnings. Just now I've found mbposter in a thread which I've just signed up to and am testing out.

If I ever get some time in the future I'll track you down for a game :thumbsup

Don't have an XBOX, but I'll look into that game sounds interesting.. Also love anything strategy related. I'm sure I'll play bridge later on in life :)

And yeah chess is all about losing.. It's fun to wipe the board against someone a lot weaker than you, but you don't learn anything, it's just making the obvious move over and over again. Making a good player actually think is more rewarding, even if you lose.

We got a pretty good circle of board gamers in town here. It's kind of funny. I've never been somewhere where so many people are into strategy board gaming. You're almost as likely to get a call for Risk, Axis & Allies, Catan, or Carcasonne as you are a poker game around here. There's a lot of good players too. Forever it was Catan, but Carcasonne seems to be the current flavor. It's a great game, very simple rules, with potential for a deeply strategic game. Same goes for Settlers of Catan, which has a huge international following. Never hurts to put a little money on the line either, hah. Both games have kind of a cult following with some really dedicated players online...

Catan has a great online app you can download at playcatan.com. You'll never have a problem getting yourself a good game going there in seconds. Carcasonneon the Other hand is lacking a good online version. Xbox Live seems to be the onlY place you can get a good match of Carcasonne going. If you're a Live gamer reading this and considering Catan on Live though,d on't bother. They slaughtered it with shitty graphics, bad gameplay controls, and by only allowing 4 player games. I stick strictly to 3 player as it is a faster game and allows for people to make huge sweeping attacks out of nowhere, whereas 4 player is a long drawn out game where you can be fucked right from the start with nothing you can even do about it...

Yeah i don't think the app is calculating that right. I am ok not great, those guys on Market St can still beat me :).

I used to play a lot of chess when I was younger, back then I was really good at it too. I just recently started playing again but I'm not nearly as good as I was back then. Takes a while to get back into it, I guess. I remember memorizing so many different moves when I played regularly which I've more or less have forgotten now. Downloading the PC client as we speak...

Recommend anywhere for learning some basic Chess strategy and playing with some other newb players?

Blows my mind how serious Chess is with people referring to games that happened decades ago, lol. Funny, because in a hundred years, people will still be refering to these games in lengthy Chess strategy discussions. Blows my mind even further when advanced players can watch another game, and know when these plays are unfolding as they are happening...

Personally I would recommend going through the classic games and playing them out on a board in front of you. I would also recommend to try playing with just a few pieces on the board to get an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of different pieces

There are certain rules that are generally true in chess, look out for tips from the masters. Here's a basic tip for a beginner...certain pieces are more useful at the beginning e.g. a knight, whereas a bishop is more useful when there's less left on the board i.e. it can target a larger number of squares

Do you generally just lookup the games online? Youtube videos? Or is there a chess app that allows you to load game sequences and watch them play out? A a book you'd recommend with a good collection of games? There's no denying Chess is the granddaddy of all Strategy gaming. It's a game I would love to get better at, but there's just nobody I know who plays really. So I'd be left mostly with online play.

I can play chess but i've only really played PC chess against the computer, i havent played against a human since i was at junior school

I have a dreadful stratagy too - i normally start off an a suicide run then try and be clever once the board has emptied a bit! :D

I used to know a website that had them all, it played them out in Java and you could pause them. It's probably still out there. Before the Internet I looked up the classic games in Encylopedias.

There'll be a chess club in your town

chess.com is pretty good. they have a strategy section and the player levels aren't trolled out with people playing at lower levels just to beat you, because that isn't very fun. The whole idea is to play someone who you think has a good chance to beat you.

Well that leaves just about everyone at this point, haha. I'm the kind of player who doesn't see a 4-move checkmate coming... :1orglaugh

There's just so much depth to it, it's amazing that some gifted people can see things to such a level so far beyond normal. :) Like playing 40 games simultaneously while blindfolded, etc. And how grandmasters can remember (and can play out on the board for you move for move) thousands of games they've played. Not just the moves but the ideas behind them, which was a mistake in hindsight, other branches they could have followed instead, it's ridiculous.



Games are usually saved in .PGN format and can be read using lots of different software. I use Chessbase products, but there's lots of free things too.

The chessbase stuff is incredible.. The mega database has 4.5 million games from the 1500's to today. You can view the games, have the computer analyze, make reports, show other games from the database that started similarly, tons of things. Plus you can build an opening book from the huge database too.. So then you can see that from whatever position you're at in the game, what moves were played most often, the average rating of players that made the move, whether white or black won 55% of the time or whatever.

Also their Chessbase Magazine is great, and connects with their Chessbase software, so you can see the moves played out on the board in your normal software while the player talks about it in a video in a pane.

http://www.chessbase-shop.com/en/products/5888

Basically all the good engines (fritz, rybka, hiarcs, even opensource ones like stockfish) are modular brains that can be plugged into the main chessbase software. If you get any of the engines, they come with the software to play, analyze, etc. Then there's also the actual more expensive Chessbase 11, that lets you really dig into things, create reports, player dossiers, more of the database side of things.

same here :(

Ya, it really is pretty incredible just how much depth the game has to it.

I love chess, but I simply don't have the time anymore.

I play regularly on ICC.
You can watch live games with grandmaster comments there. They have great training videos, it is worth the fee!

Used to play long time ago...

what kinda sucks about chess is that even if you play for years and you become "good", you will still be a newb, at anytime you will still be able to find 1000s of people online that you will have zero chance of beating...

(I know same thing kinda applies to any other game, but with chess it seems to be more true)

i am king of this game and i can't lose!

Two best countries at chess (per head)

1st Iceland
2nd Israel