chess

Chess is one of those things which I have always found to be of great interest, even though I'm not really that good at the game. Despite this weakness, or perhaps because of it, I have joined a number of correspondence chess clubs: the Correspondence Chess League of Australia (CCLA), the Internet E-mail Chess Club (IECC) and the Internet E-mail Chess Group (IECG). I log on to the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) relatively frequently, using the handle "Hasimir," though I've a tendency to wander off to other windows when not actually playing so challenges might go un-noticed. I also occasionally log on to the Internet Chess Club (ICC) as a guest, though I often cannot spare that much time to it.

To both improve my playing ability, analyze completed games and keep a database record of games I use the latest Rebel software, Rebel 10. This software has recently gained some attention through beating Anand 5-3 on a regular, but good, PC (AMD-K6 2-450, etc. more details on their site). Considering that this same software has an estimated FIDE-level Elo rating of 2788 on my machine (an AMD-K6 200 with 32Mb RAM), what Anand must've dealt with would've been truly impressive. Consider also that the highest Elo rating ever is Gary Kasparov's 2828 (he has since dropped to a "mere" 2815). Aside from Rebel's pure number crunching ability it has more than enough other useful bits and pieces to make it a worthwhile addition to my chess arsenal.

There are, of course, plenty of other great chess related sites on the web, but I'm not going to list them all. I will mention a few of my favourites and some of the better link sites from which you can find just about anything to do with the game.

Aside from the clubs I mentioned above, I'm rather fond of The Chess Café, New In Chess and Traveller Chess. The latter in particular has a rather nifty gallery of chess art including scanned pictures and ray-tracing. It also has available for download a chess true type font with which one can create chessboard diagrams like those used in books, magazines and newspapers. Though there are certainly others around, including the Epd2diag program which I used to make the GIF images for my City Chess pages.

Other important chess related sites include the official site for the International Chess Federation (FIDE) and the site for the International Correspondence Chess Federation (ICCF). In addition to these, there are some extremely worthwhile sites from which one can find just about any good chess related site on the web; Chess Space, Chess Planet and Chess World Australia ought to be more than enough to start with.

Now you can either go back, go to the site contents or e-mail me (get my PGPi public keys here).