English Chess Forum

Well I have joined a local chess club that meets every Tuesday... I am not graded and got completely wiped out by my contenders (nicely face-to-face, less so on the board)

It was suggested that I need to play as frequently as possible with real people online. Two sites got mentioned, Redhot Pawn and ChessCube. I use an iPad so cannot use a Flash enabled site?

I was wondering whether my experienced colleagues on ECF can recommend a suitable site.

Thanks in advance, Guy

P.S. I am a happy correspondence player on SchemingMind.com. Specifically I need to be looking at "live games"

Try http://www.chess.com

I use it for both correspondence and live games, and find it to be very good.

I use Gameknot but it might be `flash`..but tournaments are quite good. They run monthly events across a range of standards, so you can pitch in at any level you like. As I say, they start a new competition each month, and its not uncommon for players to have many games running simultaineously, but I dont recommend too many, because it can get time consuming.
However, do purservier at your club. Try to play a range of players, and sometimes some of the old hands will give lots of useful tips. If you can record your games and look over past games to find any errors, and good ideas that your opponents have used.
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They are all much a muchness really. Some have more functionality than others and cost more, then you could use FICS which is free and similar to chessclub.com. Most you can try out, offer coaching and a range of time controls though most are more orientated to either correspondence or rapid. If you want to play more rapid then playchess.com which is part of the chessbase setup, chesscube, chessclub, fics to mention the more popular ones are going to be what you want. If you want more correspondence then gameknot, chess.com and I think redhotpawn are better, though most sites will cater for all forms of chess including variants such as bughouse, atomic and 960. One thing to think about is also the quantity of chess players (preferably decent ones is a good guide) that use the site, it is no fun sitting around for a match.

If you want coaching (playchess and chesscube sell dvds or offer coaching services), cost options (chesscube is inherently free though has pay options, fics is totally free, playchess you have to subscribe or buy fritz to get a free year) and the general look and feel of the site. With pay sites you usually have to buy some form of online currency liek cubits which you can gamble, if you go down this route then you have to be careful players with deliberately low grades trying to nab all your dosh (they would lose graded games where there is no real money involved to lower the grade), these players are usually obvious as they play for medium or high stakes.