Chess Online
Online chess has been a prime factor that has propelled chess’s popularity in recent years. Many online sites offer a free chess game option so that anyone at anytime with any skill level can play. With the introduction of the internet, correspondence chess has jumped to the next level, eliminating any inconveniences associated with the long distance nature of it. Correspondence chess servers offer games of free chess, and is an upgrade from the traditional means of email and snail mail.
Chess (Western chess) is a board game that is played between two players with a chess board. The chessboard is square-shaped and contains 64 squares arranged on an 8 by 8 grid. Each player during a chess match starts with sixteen different pieces. Each player has one king and queen, two rooks, knights, and bishops, and eight pawns. Every unique piece on a chess board has unique ways of traveling up and down the chessboard. Both player in a game of chess has the goal of using the pieces to checkmate the opponent’s king. This means that the king is under attack, and there is no possible move that will deem the king safe from the attack. If a king is in check, it means it is being attacked, but there is a move that will keep it safe, either by moving the king or another piece to block the attack.
Correspondence chess is a type of variant that can last days at a time, usually with a limit on the number of moves done every day. It is different from over-the-board chess because players do not sit at a chessboard at the same time and they usually play a game remotely. It was not long before the first chess servers were created on the internet in the 1970s, allowing a person lucky enough to have such a young technology to play a free chess game with anyone else with internet capabilities. The technology was primitive at the time, but it was a framework for what was to come.
The first system to offer free chess was the PLATO System program entitled “chess3″. Many people used chess3 as a long-term chess server, with many games usually taking several days to complete, although it was feasible to play a free chess game in one sitting. Soon, email gave correspondence chess a new level of communication, allowing almost instantaneous communication when players made moves, allowing a dozen or more moves to be made in a week by the 1980s.
It was not long before the internet was in millions of homes across the entire globe. As companies began creating dot comes by the thousands, many tried to capitalize on the growing popularity of the internet. One of the first popular chess servers, which would become a model for modern chess servers today, began charging its users for membership in 1995. Many people were against this move, believing that free chess is important.
Recently, free chess is much easier to come by, and those who resisted paying for it have seen their efforts pay off. Many websites offer a free chess game server along with many other features to help people gain a better understanding off chess.
