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| Now it is your move....to join LCCC on Chess .com! |
The bidding for the next Olympics or Super Bowl sites was
not this intense!
All you have to do is make an account on Chess .com. You can
join for free! Be sure to pick a fun screen name, and send an email to the club
hotmail or yahoo account to let us know.
I would suggest that Chess .com is well worth the Gold
membership ($5 a month, $29 a year), but it is not necessary to join the LCCC
on the site.
Once you have joined, click on the “Share” tab on the site and
then the “Groups and Teams” link.
Type in “Livingston County Chess Club” and of course the
country is the United States,
and hit enter.
Post a note stating you wish to join, and you will be added.
If we know you are already a member of Chess. com, and have
your handle, we probably have sent you a request to join. But if we missed you,
forgive us, because as I told you the negotiations with all the other on-line
chess sites was exhausting!
Not to mention the comforting and setting up support groups
for all the sites that we did not choose. They were devastated!
Emails will be coming out shortly to all members whose
emails we have. In addition, phone calls will be made to all whose phone
numbers we have. You think telemarketers are bad, wait til LCCC burns up the
phone lines.
We are hoping this addition to our chess club will not only
increase our membership, but it will allow members to stay connected even if
they can’t make Monday nights very often. Not to mention all the great chess we
will still be able to play with our LCCC friends.
Enjoy!
Who's idea was it to pick chess.com? The Internet Chess Club (ICC) http://www.chessclub.com/ has by far the best content and player services of any internet chess offering. The live coverage of the recently concluded Candidates Tournament was worth the nominal membership fee alone. There are millions of master games in the archives all organized by ECO code, there are tons of instructional videos and lectures, and the number of highly-rated titled players as members reads like a whos-who list of GMs and IMs.
ReplyDeleteIMHO chess.com is a distant 2nd option to ICC. I suggest that folks who are serious about improving their games should try it out.
Chess dot com was picked by the VP and a few others based on(in order of importance to me but not necessarily by the others):
ReplyDelete1. Most current members of the LCCC already there (important for getting started - we can always move if the Club decides later)
2. Most current members of the chess community (a bigger audience and pool of players)
3. Able to play for free if you don't want to or can't buy and upgraded account (very important for some LCCC members)
4. Chess tactics trainer available
5. Chess openings trainer available
ICC was ommitted because;
1. Only a 30 day trial membership
2. Only 30,000 members (current Wikipiedia numbers from 2013 article) to nearly 7 million on Chess dot com (because of the ability to play for free).
I personally will sign up for the free 30 day trial at ICC to give it a try, and write an article for the blog about the experience.
Chess dot com vs ICC - from a wood pusher's perspective!
This comment has been removed by the author.
Delete2. Most current members of the chess community
ReplyDelete(a bigger audience and pool of players)
-----------------------------------------
You want to go for quality over quantity in all cases here.
Having a bigger pool of fish isn't going to make you or anyone else a
stronger player. ;-)
3. Able to play for free if you don't want to or can't buy and
upgraded account (very important for some LCCC members)
---------------------------------------------------------------
You get what you pay for, and I suspect that, like most
things that start out "free", chess.com won't be free for long.
4. Chess tactics trainer available
-----------------------------------
OK, but ICC also has:
* TrainingBot, which quizes you on real tactics taken from real ICC
games. It kibitzes the goal, the author, and the difficulty level. If you
don't get the solution, it gives hints.
* ProblemBot, which "...is similar to TrainingBot except that it is for
chess compositions. It has fairly practical positions often adapted from real
games and most of its puzzles are unusual-looking positions with surprising,
subtle and often quite beautiful answers."
* Attack! A regular weekly feature with GM Larry Christiansen on tactics and
attacking chess.
5. Chess openings trainer available
------------------------------------
Try the the opening survey series by ICC GM Ronen Har-Zvi
(http://www6.chessclub.com/chessfm/index/ronen/index.html) and the How to Win
series by GM Boris Alterman. Ronen's series is a treasure trove of practical
knowledge about all kinds of openings. GM Alterman discusses the various
strategic themes and concepts needed to play middlegames. There are many other
GM training videos ... too many to list here. All sorts of materials for
beginner, intermediate, and advanced players.
Maybe I'm biased, but for my money, ICC has a tremendous amount of features.
It is the only chess server/service I'm aware of that actually does live
coverage of major chess events with GM commentary. I can save all my games
that I play and download them to my computer at home.
I'm eager to see your report. One more thing: when you do decide to start the
trial, use the older Blitzin interface, not the newer Dasher. Dasher is
utterly horrible -- worse than putting background images on webpages.
Why ICC promotes this junk as a replacement for Blitzin, I have no clue.