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Chessville
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1-4-03 World Chess Network
Since September 26th 2002 WCN has been home to John Henderson's "The Scotsman". Each week John provides commentary on a current chess event, and an unannotated master game. Larry Evans also writes a weekly column for WCN - "Larry Evans On Chess". Evans features a variety of interesting items, from current events, to historical reminiscences, to editorial rants. When I first started following WCN I noticed another column, "The Chess Beat" by Larry Parr. The first Chess Beat I saw was dated December 1st, 2001 and provided an in-depth look at "The Uneasy Art of Resigning a Lost Position". Unfortunately, there were no more of Parr's interesting columns until September 1st of 2002, and there haven't been any more posted since. A Chess History section, also by Parr, includes biographies and a selection of games by 21 "World Champions", from Andre Philidor to Alexander Khalifman; results of world championship matches and tournaments from Andre Philidor vs. Phillip Stamma to Vladimir Kramnik vs. Garry Kasparov. Despite the content, the World Chess Network is, first and foremost, a place to play chess, an ICS. To play, you must download their 2 Mb proprietary interface. WCN does offer a free ten-day trial membership, but after that you either pony up for a membership ($49.95 annually for unlimited access) or you can continue to play for free, but only as an unrated, and you can not attend their events: Master Challenges - Pit your abilities versus a titled player head-to-head; Community Challenges - Join up with the other members of the WCN community and combine your chess knowledge to take on a titled player; Attend thier Lecture Series - WCN lectures are geared to all levels of player; Watch Banter Games - WCN takes two titled players and puts them in a head-to-head match where they explain each move to the audience; Play Predict-A-Move - Guess the moves of the masters and earn points for your chess knowledge; and Visit the Chat Room - talk to chess players from all over the world. Finding a game seems a bit awkward to me - there is no seek
graph, a la Blitzen, or many of the FICS interfaces. In fact, you can not
make an open challenge - you can only seek a game by challenging a specific
player. When I was logged on for this review, the list of players present
showed only 88 of 430 players, and only two of those were available for a
game. Yet I was there only a few minutes before a challenge window popped
up, and I was challenged to a 5-0 blitz game. Many of the features you
might expect to find at a premium-based ICS are present, including chat,
observing other games, and analyzing online. Check out the
World Chess Network for
yourself. |
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