English Chess Forum

Are you confining your thoughts to players only or do your comments extend to include the entire chess industry and associated services? I know a large number of persons who make a living from chess. Some of them are players and some are players with other chess activities in their portfolio. John,...

Just found this quote and thought it might be useful to back up my arguments (see http://www.chessvideos.tv/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1885 ) GM Mark Hebden, who is only around the 2500 elo range, has for years earned his living teaching and by winning weekend congresses. He told me he earns about £20,0...

I saw this thread and I had to laugh... Money and chess have never really been bed pals. There is no money in chess. The reason I chose to turn my back on chess for 8 years and concentrate on my studies is because you cannot make a decent living from it. You simply can't. Even if you sold chess book...

I think I understand but I would not want to play my club games over the internet. I'm happy to sit for 4 hours playing a game over the board, but I couldn't sit and stare at a 2d screen for 4 hours. Plus there's always the temptation to check your emails, surf the web or have a long IM conversatio...

Okay let me explain it another way, my point is, club chess costs to rent for the nights you play. What if you could play club tournaments etc. or run club training sessions 24/7 any time you want, you'd be able to attract more members to your club (because more people could attend). This doesn't re...

I had understood TDD to be weak around interfaces, but I'm open to correction. Blitzin does indeed look old, because it is. ICC push Dasher for windows users these days. I bought an iPad recently, and am enjoying the touch screen interface, although I feel a bit like I am beta testing. I've logged ...

Paul Cooksey wrote:

JamesMurphy wrote:I've been somewhat disappointed at the breadth of options available for playing quality chess online

I'm too astonished to respond.

Insert 'decent' before options

Carl Hibbard wrote:I have been known to dabble in software before

I know you run the site Carl I'm just saying it's a little disappointing at the lack of choice in the market of online chess and it does seem like there is a monopoly forming.

It's about time online chess became a bit more sociable anyway! No, I wan't to play chess online with software that is nice, fast and as slim as possible and I don't want to chat after I beat you but just play again... Even if it was against people you knew in real life? For example what if you wan...

BlitzIn / Chess.com UIs are not written to be useable, anyone who claims otherwise is quite simply wrong and that's coming from someone who has 5 years+ experience in the industry. Something like BlitzIn is ideal for online, you really don't need anything more snazzy :!: I'm not talking about snazz...

FICS is a reasonable Free alternative to ICC. I used to have a paid account on ICC but I decided that apart from the chess fm videos, I didn't feel I was getting much more for my money that I was already getting at FICS. There are team leagues on both ICC and FICS, known as the Team League or 45 45...

The one great thing about ICC was the iPhone app... that was the most positive move I saw them make, on the whole though the User Interfaces look like they were made 10 years ago... We have modern technologies these days - rich flash applications, very nice intuitive javascript / css wep application...

I've been somewhat disappointed at the breadth of options available for playing quality chess online. It seems that ICC and chess.com are way ahead of the others. Despite having what I believe are poor user experiences. It seems like a bit of a monopoly at present. So what I'd like to ask you all is...

I setup my club ( Chorlton Chess Club ) website in a matter of weeks using Wordpress . Although it takes a little bit of technical know how to setup it literally only takes about 30-minutes to an hour to get the website up and running on a web host. You can even host it yourself if you have a dedica...

Charles, Congratulations on all your achievements in Bradford. Graded or not it's a remarkable thing to accomplish getting any investment especially in these troubled financial times. I'm wondering if it would be possible to copy your model in other parts of the UK. Somewhere like Manchester could g...