The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a commercial

Internet chess server An Internet chess server (ICS) is an external server that provides the facility to play, discuss, and view the board game of chess over the Internet. The term specifically refers to facilities for connecting players through a variety of graphical c ...

devoted to the play and discussion of

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...

and

chess variant A chess variant is a game related to, derived from, or inspired by chess. Such variants can differ from chess in many different ways. "International" or "Western" chess itself is one of a family of games which have related origins and could be co ...

s. ICC had over 30,000 subscribing members in 2005.John Black, Martin Cochran, Martin Ryan Gardner
"Lessons Learned: A Security Analysis of the Internet Chess Club"
acsac, pp.245–253, 21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC'05), 2005. It was the first Internet chess server and was the largest

pay to play Pay-to-play, sometimes pay-for-play or P2P, is a phrase used for a variety of situations in which money is exchanged for services or the privilege to engage in certain activities. The common denominator of all forms of pay-to-play is that one mu ...

chess server in 2005.

History

The first

(ICS), programmed by Michael Moore and Richard Nash, was launched on 15 January 1992. Players logged in by

telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...

, and the board was displayed as

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

text. Bugs in the server software allowed illegal moves, false checkmates etc. Over time more and more features were added to ICS, such as

Elo ratings The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. The Elo system was invented as an improved c ...

and a choice of graphical interfaces. The playing pool grew steadily, many of the server bugs were fixed, and players began to have higher expectations for stability. Later on in 1992,

Daniel Sleator Daniel Dominic Kaplan Sleator (born 10 December 1953) is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. In 1999, he won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award (jointly with Robert Tarjan) for the splay tre ...

(darooha) volunteered to take over as head programmer, and began a large overhaul of the server code. He addressed, among other issues, the frequent complaint that players would lose blitz games on time due to Internet lag. In 1994, he copyrighted the code, and began receiving purchase offers from companies wanting to commercialize the server. On 1 March 1995, Sleator announced his intentions to commercialize ICS, renaming it the Internet Chess Club, or ICC, and charging a yearly membership fee. The membership is free for players with a Grandmaster or

International Master FIDE titles are awarded by the international chess governing body FIDE (''Fédération Internationale des Échecs'') for outstanding performance. The highest such title is Grandmaster (GM). Titles generally require a combination of Elo rating and ...

title. Some programmers who had worked on the original ICS became unhappy with what they saw as the commoditization of their project. Led by Chris Petroff, they formed the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), which to this day continues to allow everyone to access all features for free."Pawns Call King a Rook"
Brad Stone, Retrieved 14 September 2009. On 29 May 2007, the World Chess Network was bought by the Internet Chess Club. It was then merged with Chess Live, another Internet chess server acquired by Internet Chess Club from GamesParlor. The result of the acquisition and merger was the formation of World Chess Live, a new Internet chess server that merged features of both services. World Chess Live merged into, and become part of, the Internet Chess Club on 19 March 2012. For some years, the

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

on-line chess portal JaqueMate.org had technological support provided by ICC. The portal closed on 30 April 2013 with members transferred to ICC.

Services available

ICC's core service is the facility to play chess games (and a number of chess variants) against other members and computers coupled with a rating system. ICC also offers many different types of tournaments. ICC recently partnered with the

United States Chess Federation The United States Chess Federation (also known as US Chess or USCF) is the governing body for chess competition in the United States and represents the U.S. in FIDE, the World Chess Federation. US Chess administers the official national rating ...

(USCF) to provide USCF rated online quick and blitz tournaments (these online ratings are separate from the USCF over-the-board quick and blitz rating systems apart from the initial seeding of the online quick and blitz ratings for unrated players). Members can also watch live broadcasts of tournaments with grandmaster commentary on Chess.FM, watch games involving titled players being played on ICC and challenge grandmasters in simultaneous exhibitions. The site also offers access to libraries of games, recorded lectures and private lessons (at additional cost).

Software

ICC provides the proprietary Windows BlitzIn software, currently at version 3.11, and the Dasher program, currently at version 1.5.8. There are other software front-ends which work with the ICC system including those for the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

and

iPad The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, ...

. Along with other major chess sites, ICC has sophisticated methods to detect computer cheating.

Criticism

The commercialisation of ICC was extensively criticised by users, particularly that Daniel Sleator was charging a subscription to use a system that had been developed by others. Following complaints by students, they were offered a 50% discount. The security of the system was criticised in December 2005 with claims that communications between ICC and users could easily be read and that the

timestamp A timestamp is a sequence of characters or encoded information identifying when a certain event occurred, usually giving date and time of day, sometimes accurate to a small fraction of a second. Timestamps do not have to be based on some absolut ...

ing could be defeated.

Internet Computer Chess Tournament

The Internet Computer Chess Tournament (CCT) was a chess tournament for computer chess programs held from 2000 to 2011. It was organised annually by the Internet Chess Club. The format was a Swiss system varying between 7 and 9 game rounds, with time controls (from CCT7 onwards) of 50 minutes and 3 second increments. The tournament was set to be completed in one weekend.

References

External links

Official site
Internet chess servers Chess websites Companies based in Pittsburgh Privately held companies based in Pennsylvania Internet properties established in 1995 1995 establishments in the United States