Internet Chess Club

The Internet Chess Club is a commercial Internet site devoted to the play and discussion of chess and chess variants. Paid members and guests play tens of thousands of games each day, and it is not uncommon to find over 2,000 chess players logged on to ICC. Additional services, most of which are available only to paid members, include

• live broadcast of grandmaster tournaments with professional commentary
• a searchable database of grandmaster games
• recorded lectures on various chess themes
• regular club tournaments
• private lessons by professionals
• ongoing player ratings modeled on the Elo rating system
• dozens of chat channels on various chess topics

History

In the late 1980s a band of volunteers created the first Internet chess server (ICS) for fun. Players logged in by telnet, the board was displayed as ASCII text Bugs in the server software allowed, for example, rooks to be taken en passant, but the server was popular among a small group of chess enthusiasts excited by the possibility of playing chess at great distances with the new technology.

Over time more and more features were added to ICS, such as ELO ratings 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.

In 1992, Daniel Sleator 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 March 1, 1995, Sleator announced his intentions to commercialize ICS himself, renaming it the Internet Chess Club, or ICC, and charging a yearly membership fee of $49. This announcement was highly controversial among existing members. Many volunteers who had contributed in various ways to the flourishing of ICS were upset that anyone would attempt to profit from their efforts. ICC distributed several dozen free accounts to volunteers, but not everyone was mollified. Active players on the server who were used to the service being provided without charge were not pleased with the addition of the steep membership fee. Also, students complained that the $49 per year bill was too much for them to pay, but ICC implemented a policy where students could receive a student discout rate at $29 per year. Further, there were questions about whether Sleator was right to claim that the ICS was his intellectual property, since he did not code the original server, although he had made substantial improvements to its code.

A handful of programmers who had worked on the original ICS and were not happy with what they saw as the commodification of their project, organized by Chris Petroff, formed the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), and continued to allow everyone to have access to all features for free. The server remains operational today.

Despite its controversial beginning, ICC retained enough members and offered enough services to sustain a thriving chess community. ICC has roughly double the paid playing population it had in 1996. Not counting guests accounts (who play on ICC for free without having access to ratings and other features), ICC currently has about three times the playing population of Free Internet Chess Server.

The free game services Yahoo and Pogo have a much larger number of chess players logged on at any given time than the Internet Chess Club. On the other hand, ICC has by far the largest active population of internationally titled players (FM, IM, and GM), who get complimentary accounts. In general, serious chess players are drawn to the rich set of services and features on ICC and FICS.

External links

• Internet Chess Club (http://www.chessclub.com) (ICC) - The official website of the Internet Chess Club
• Free Internet Chess Server (http://www.freechess.org) (FICS) - The official website of the Free Internet Chess Server
• Yahoo Chess vs. the Chess Servers (http://www.edcollins.com/chess/yahoo-vs-servers.htm) - An argument that the ICC and FICS servers are preferable to Java-based chess servers such as Yahoo! games
• Pawns Call King a Rook (http://www.edcollins.com/chess/fics-icc.htm) - A more detailed history of the Internet Chess Server
• http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/chess/computer/part1/ - A FAQ on Internet chess, posted in 1995
• http://members.cox.net/cpetroff/FICS/ - Another history of the Internet Chess Server, by Chris Petroffsl:Internet Chess Club