Tuirgin

I may start making some time to play real-time games a couple times per week. Ideally what I’d like to find is something like what I experienced last night at KGS—I played an unrated 13×13 board with someone in the Beginner’s Room, and when the game was complete we were able to see the comments the various kibitzers left, and were able to review the game and continue commenting on it with each other and with the kibitzers. Which real-time chess servers are most geared towards this type of community interaction? Any of them? ICS, FICS, Chess.com’s live chess beta? I prefer to stay away from servers that don’t have a Mac or Linux client, but if, for example, Playchess.com wins hands down I might give in (after some sulking and swearing).

Thanks in advance.

I HATE ADVERTISEMENTS. And I am not ashamed. I won’t browse the web without my trusty AdBlock Plus (for Firefox) or GlimmerBlocker (for Safari). The quickest way to turn me off of a web browser is to lack a decent advert blocker. And the quickest way to turn me off of a website is to try to guilt me into getting rid of my ad blockers.

A couple weeks ago I signed up for a free account at GameKnot so that I could evaluate the site. It didn’t take me very long to settle on Chess.com and SchemingMind, but I’ve been playing through my first game over at GameKnot. I don’t want to abandon the game—it’s just a matter of courtesy. I started the game, it hasn’t been dull or boring, and I owe it to my opponent to finish it. If I’m allowed to finish it, that is. (continue reading…)

Wow. Why are ChessCafe’s feeds so, well, missing? Subscribing to their RSS feed gave me a whopping 4 items, and none of them the item I was interested in. I simply cannot be expected to keep up with a website by visiting it regularly. I wait for notification from my feed aggregator and then visit the site if the content promises to be interesting. I simply don’t have hours every day to browse around the web revisiting all my favorite sites to check for updates. But I’m also not going to sit back and complain without trying to do anything about it. Thanks to Feed43 anyone can feed their favorite malnourished website.

Today I’m feeding Dan Heisman. Let’s get all the novices that read Novice Nook fat and happy.

XML: Dan Heisman’s ChessCafe column, Novice Nook

After joining SchemingMind as a full member the other day I went ahead and followed the steps outlined on the site to register myself as an affiliate. Lo and Behold—I received an email shortly thereafter from none other than Austin Lockwood, the web-master and creator of SchemingMind.

It was a very good email, which I think should be shared with others as it gives some insight into what SchemingMind is all about, what the motivations for the service are, where it’s coming from, and where it’s headed. I emailed Austin, asking permission to post his email, and he has graciously approved it.

I want to make very clear though, that Austin did not contact me at any time prior to my becoming a full member of SchemingMind. As his email below shows, he was cautious of doing anything which might seem like an unwelcome plug for his site, and that in itself says quite a bit about the culture of SchemingMind and why it is a good fit for me.

His email follows: (continue reading…)

For the last couple weeks I’ve been playing at both Chess.com and SchemingMind and I’ve been trying to figure out which site is going to give me the biggest returns on my investment of time and money. I also tried out LetsPlayChess, and just today RedHotPawn and GameKnot. I’m sure each has its devotees, and perhaps they all have some stand-out feature. As I’ve already discussed I like SchemingMind’s simplicity, lack of distraction, and the ratio of its affordability to feature set. LetsPlayChess underwhelmed me as being rather an old interface and not very clean, though the community seemed nice. GameKnot and RHP—well, I really didn’t spend long enough with them to give them a fair evaluation, because the reality is I kept finding myself coming back to Chess.com and liking it. The one oddity I kept coming across both on RHP and across the web was the teeth gnashing certain members of RHP were doing in respect to GameKnot. I don’t have any clue what the history is there, but someone’s cheerios got pissed on somewhere at some point. (continue reading…)

For the last several weeks I’ve been trying to decide which site I prefer for correspondence chess—SchemingMind or Chess.com. I joined SchemingMind back in December 2006 when I was experiencing my first outbreak of Chess obsession. It’s a nice, very simple site. I’ve never spent any time on the forums. I haven’t joined tournaments. I just use it to play a few corr games, mostly with people I already know. It doesn’t have a bunch of busy advertisements, and it doesn’t have all the latest ad-on services requiring an ever more expensive subscription. Subscription mostly gives you more of what you already get—instead of 10 concurrent games, you can play unlimited games; instead of 1 mini-tournament every 6 weeks, you get unlimited mini-tournies; instead of only joining 1 team, you can join 8. You get the idea. Unless you are wanting to start your own teams and tournaments, you can do quite a bit for free—oh, and did I mention you can play your ICCF games at SchemingMind?

One of my favorite SchemingMind features is the mobile version of the site. (continue reading…)