Useful Chess Links

Internet Chess Servers

There are numerous internet chess servers, where you can play chess online with human opponents. You will get a rating which will go up or down depending on the games you win and the strength of the players you beat. But many chess servers have very few users, so are not particularly good. The following are the most popular chess servers:

Internet Chess Club (ICC) Although you can get a Free 7-day trial, this site is commercial and is the most popular chess server.
Free Internet Chess Server(FICS) As the name suggests, this site is free to use.
Chess Live Like ICC, this site is commercial, but not as popular as ICC
Playchess.com is yet another internet chess server. Again, not as popular as ICC

Chess Software

There are many sorts of software developed for chess, which can be grouped into several categories.

Chess Databases

Scid, which stands for Shane's Chess Information Database, is a free open-source chess database. Scid runs on both Windows and UNIX systems. It is no longer developed, but is very functional.
Chessbase is a chess database for Microsoft windows. Unlike Scid, this is not free and is in fact quite expensive.

Chess Engines

Crafty developed by Professor Robert Hyatt is a free open-source chess engine. It has a very rudimentary text-based interface, but uses the so-called Winboard protocol. Hence you can use it with any interface which supports this protocol. Crafty is a strong chess engine, which can run on machines with multiple processors.

Chess Software for Pocket PC and Palm handheld device

There are numerous chess programs for Small handheld computers such as the HP iPAQ, Dell Axiom and Palm. There is a review of 63 such programs performed by Dr. Axel Schumacher. A summary of the results is available, or the full review which is just over 3 MB in size. First place was won by Pocket Grandmaster which is a commercial program. This is an excellent program. Second place was won by CE Board and third was given to Pocket Fritz 2. These are all for Pocket PC. The highest ranked device for Palm was Chessmaster

There are to my knowledge only two programs that allow you to connect to internet chess servers from a PDA. These are Intellichess and Thinkerboard. The web site for Intellichess looks very attractive, but the software is just about unusable. Thinkerboard is a little better, but is only alpha software, so it clearly not fully debugged. But Thinkerboard is the better of the two and has the advantage of being free.

Chess Related Newsgroups

Several Internet Newsgroups are devoted to chess. An archive is kept of the message by Google.

rec.games.chess.computer for discussions about computer software for chess.
rec.games.chess.politics Chess Politics
rec.games.chess.analysis People post the PGN files from their games here, and others comment on the games.
rec.games.chess.misc for all things not covered in any of the above newsgroups.

Website administered by Dr. David Kirkby of http://www.essex-computing.co.uk/