Playing chess is one of the ways in which I relax in front of a computer. A decade back, I used to play against the computer. Back then, it didn’t take me long to master my opponent’s playing style and I got bored after a while. These days, however, there’s a plethora of very strong commercial chess playing/teaching softwares which one can purchase and install on one’s computer. One such software that I used and had a great learning experience is Chessmaster 10000 by Ubisoft which remains the best-selling chess franchise in history. But playing against a machine can be a discouraging experience in your early days of learning chess since even moderate softwares can completely destroy an average player.
This is why I prefer playing online chess against humans. I’ve been playing quite a lot on FlyorDie.com and chesscube.com in the past few years. I’ll talk about the first site today. In nutshell, this is what you need to get started.
(1) Get java-1.4.2 or higher.
(2) Register yourself. You can play as a guest but you won’t have a rating and most good players will refuse to play against you since a game against a guest player doesn’t affect your rating.
(3) Select the kind of game that you want to play. You may play blitz (5 min), informant (10 min) or rapid chess (20 min). I generally prefer rapid chess since it allows some time to achieve a decent quality game. Informant chess is a different kind of game that allows pawn promotion in the last but one row.
If you have any doubts regarding playing online chess then feel free to post your queries in comment form.
Leave a Reply