Internet Chess Club

From Free net encyclopedia

The Internet Chess Club is a commercial Internet site devoted to the play and discussion of chess and chess variants by chess players. 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

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History

In the late 1980s a band of volunteers created the first Internet chess server for fun. Players logged in by telnet, and the board was displayed as ASCII text. Bugs in the server software allowed illegal moves such as the taking of rooks 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 membership fee. Also, students complained that the $49 per year bill was too much for them to pay, so ICC implemented a 50% discount for students. As of 2005, membership fees had not been raised from the original rates. 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, led by Chris Petroff, became unhappy with what they saw as the commoditization of their project. They 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 origins, ICC retained enough members and offered enough services to sustain a thriving chess community. ICC has roughly doubled the paid playing population it had in 1996. ICC currently has about three times the playing population of FICS, not counting guest accounts (who play on ICC for free without having access to ratings and other features).

The free game services provided by Yahoo! and Pogo.com 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. Players with GM, IM, WGM, or WIM titles get complimentary accounts. In general, serious chess players are drawn to the rich set of services and features on ICC and FICS.

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