19 March 2011

Chess960 Short Cuts

Posting only once a week on chess960 means a lot of good topics fall through the sieve. Here are a few points that are worth mentioning and that might provide useful material for future posts.

LSS: The Lechenicher SchachServer, Lss.chess-server.net, listed to the right under 'Correspondence (Turnbased)' online play sites and better known as LSS, has offered chess960 since June 2009. I've played traditional chess there for several years, but haven't tried the chess960 play because the unusual c960 time controls aren't compatible with a busy schedule. I'm sure I'll try it one of these days. The site recently released its first PGN archive of chess960 game scores. Since the file includes the players' ratings they should be a good source of games between strong players.

Scheming Mind: Another 'Correspondence' online play site is Schemingmind.com, where I've been playing chess960 since I first took it up. Thanks to an invitation from one of the team captains, I just found out that they have leagues and team play. This in itself wouldn't be worth mentioning, except that the matches feature two concurrent games between each pair of players, both games using the same start position with colors switched. This should allow some useful comparisons and contrasts about how good players tackle start positions. The current season marks the fifth year for the league.

Chess960 Jungle: HarryO, who has been commenting on this blog since last summer, has started his own blog called Chess960 Jungle, also linked on the right sidebar. He has a different angle on things than I do, so I'm sure our two blogs will be complementary.

The Google Lottery: As the following image attests, both this blog and my main blog, Chess for All Ages (CFAA), appeared in the top-5 links on a chess960 search. Appearing at 3rd & 5th on the list probably says more about the lack of good chess960 sites than it does about my skills as a blogger, but I was still pleased to see it.


Since then, this blog has fallen back to its usual place around 9th-10th, and CFAA has disappeared off the radar. Oh, well! Glad I took the snapshot of the screen for my scrapbook.

1 comment:

Mekk said...

Note that on LSS people play engine-assisted (legally, LSS inherited this approach from IECG) while SchemingMind expects players to play by theirselves (and while likely there are some cheaters, most seem to obey the rules).

PS As far as I know SchemingMind is one of the oldest chess960 correspondence sites on the net, chess960 (then called Fischer Random) is available there since late 2003, events like chess960 championships and leagues are organised since 2005. If I remember correctly, email based E4EC (http://www.e4ec.org) started it even earlier, not sure whether any web-based site beats SchemingMind.