This will be a short post, but I have to share it with you. I just found the fantastic page http://www.ficsgames.com/, where your FICS (Free Internet Chess Site AKA freechess.org) are stored.

You can save them or re-play them. You can also search for games by players, ratings, variants, ECO code of the opening, date. Or you can study the history of games of a player there.

Very nice and useful site. And thanks to Nezha – the author of http://mrnezhmetdinov.blogspot.com/, where I found the link to the site.

P.S. If you don’t know what FICS is, read my post Where to play chess online – part II. FICS (Freechess.org)

Freechess.org (also known as Free Internet Chess Server – FICS) was the first place, where I started to play chess online seriously. Before that time I played on some servers, but Freechess.org gave me the real feeling of educated chess community for the very first time.

At these days FICS has more than 300000 registered users and this huge number makes it one of the largest internet chess servers where you can play chess over the internet for free.

Functions on FICS are quite expected from chess server. You can play single games with any time limit, you can play tournament (I remember one where I even took some prize), you can attend chess lessons or chat with other users. Of course, games could be rated or unrated – depending on your choice during setup the game.

There is also a choice of different chess rules and you can play games in suicide chess, bughouse etc.

To be able to play chess on FICS you need a client. Yes, playing through browser is not possible. Or do you know about any plugin to Firefox for example? I am using WinBoard client. The control of your activities on FICS through WinBoard is a bit user unfriendly – it is in “unix mode”, so you have to write your commands on classic command line. Maybe there are better clients for FICS from this perspective, but you know – old habit is old habit.

When I have time, I usually try to participate in blitz tournaments (5 minutes per game) on Saturday and Monday. My nick is nyxcia and I would be happy to meet you on FICS.

Do you have your profile on Facebook? The #1 social site of these days? If not then you should have it. It is not only good place to share information, news, photos, links etc. with your friends, but also a good place to play chess. Don’t you believe? Then check the application called My Chess!

My Chess allows you to play an individual games with your friends, but it also allows to attend in tournaments and even to create your own tournament. The tournament could be open for everyone or only for your friends. Another parameters of tournaments are:

• tournament mode (single round robin, double round robin)
• thinking time
• required rating level
• min. reliability of players (very good parameter if you want only players who finish the tournament!)
• games are rated or not
• opening theme (yes, you can create thematic tournaments for the variants you like or you want to train)

As you see games could be rated. The rating is counted after finishing each game according the ELO rating system formulas.

There is also an rating list of players available on My Chess. The best player at the moment is Jose Maria Lasso Frias (Spain) with rating 2121.

If you are on Facebook and love chess, I would recommend you My Chess application. It is for free, you will enjoy a lot of chess battles and improve your chess skills. And you can find new friends through it as well.

BTW: If you want to challenge me, you can do it through this link: http://apps.facebook.com/mychess/invitations.php?challenge=627011561. I will be happy to accept your challenge, but I usually play 25 online games at maximum (when playing more than 25 games, then the quality of my play is going down), so don’t be disappointed if I would not start the game with you.

Photo: chrisdigo