Arasan also works with Arena, another free chess interface, and with UCI-compatible programs like Shredder. It includes an opening 'book' with over 200,000 moves. Best VPN Services for 2020. Veccia vaglieri grammatica pdf en. FICS - Free Internet Chess Server is a server for chess players to play against each other over the Internet. FICS supports tournaments, lectures, live game relays, chess variants (Suicide, Bughouse, Crazyhouse, Atomic) and lots more.
NOTE: I may update this post as apps add features or I learn of better alternatives. Feel free to send me suggestions to try! Also, many of these programs are free, but accept donations. If you can, consider donating to the projects you use
I have used LINUX as my primary operating system for about seven years now. I love the ability to tinker with and customize my computer, and LINUX has provided me with all the flexibility I could want. Personally, I use the Ubuntu distribution; it is the most popular distribution, and it is favored by none other than former FIDE world champion Ruslan Ponomariov :) However, I have also tried openSuse, Fedora, Mint, and Arch over the years.
These days LINUX is just as user friendly and stable as Windows and Mac. However, LINUX still has fewer users which means there is less support for LINUX among software developers. That means fewer chess apps. It has taken me quite a long time to find LINUX alternatives to all of the softwares that are available elsewhere, but today, I am very happy with the options that are available.
The following is simply a list of my personally preferred LINUX apps for chess. I use most of these on a daily basis. There are plenty of alternatives out there as well, but this is an excellent core set of softwares.
Chess Programs
SCID/SCID vs. PC - SCID stands for Shane’s Chess Information Database. SCID does just about everything that you could want from a chess program. SCID is primarily designed to work with databases, and it allows you to create, edit, and search large databases very quickly. SCID also contains functions to play against and analyze with engines, annotate games, play on FICS, interact with DGT boards, etc. There are very few functions that SCID does not provide. I have a set of youtube tutorials showing some of the basic SCID functions that I recommend to my students.
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SCID vs. PC is a dubiously named, but very well developed, fork of SCID. In fact, I strongly recommend using SCID vs. PC instead of SCID because of the more regular and useful updates to the program. Steven and the various other developers deserve high praise. The one advantage of SCID right now is that it has a bit better LINUX support such as being available for download from the Software Center and looking a bit more native.
ChessX - ChessX (recommended by @KMagik) is a very nice alternative to SCID. It doesn't offer quite as much functionality, but it has most of the basic features, and those features all seem to work very well. The project seemed stagnant for awhile, but it is now developing rapidly, and I am eager to see how the program develops over the next year. The program is developed with QT which provides a nice interface and should be an excellent platform to build on going forward.
PyChess - PyChessdoesn’t do as much as SCID or ChessX, but it still does quite alot. It’s a very user friendly program for LINUX that allows playing games against engines or humans, playing on FICS, and playing through and annotating a game. If you are a casual chess player that would like a simple program to annotate or play a personal game on occasion, PyChess may be the right program for you. PyChess has made some nice improvements since the last time I used it; hearty compliments to the developers on their fine work.
Engines
There are many fine engines for LINUX. I recommend Stockfish and Critter personally. It is useful to have two engines to get a second opinion on complicated positions. Both Stockfish and Critter are free and have native LINUX versions available. In my experience, Stockfish may actually be the stronger program in terms of move selection, but the evaluations are not intended to be human readable. The evaluations often seem inflated to me, and it can be difficult for me to determine whether a +.5 evaluation is actually an edge or an illusion. Critter’s evaluations are more compatible with human evaluations, and it seems to task my processor a bit less so I tend to use it more often. Both are very capable 3000+ ELO engines which are more than suitable for most players. Komodo (recommended by @KMagik) is also a top level engine that provides a Linux version. Komodo has a reputation for positional insight. The latest version (7) is available for sale, but version 5 is made available for free.
Servers
One of my lengthiest frustrations about chess on LINUX was the lack of client support for chess servers. I have played on ICC for years, but they have never had great support for LINUX. Jin does what it does well, but there are many functions it doesn’t support. ICC has a new web app, but it also seems comparatively limited at the moment. My frustrations have lead me to let my membership lapse so I am no longer able to speak to the newer options, but Lantern (recommended by @zotalegre) looks promising.
These days, I prefer browser based chess servers as I don't have to worry about ongoing platform support. More and more chess servers are making the browser the default platform. I personally play on Chess.com, and I am 95% satisfied with the live server experience. The one feature I really miss is the ability to analyze with an engine after a game is over. I regularly want to review a moment from a blitz game with an engine. It is not difficult to copy the pgn into SCID, but I would really like to be able to analyze it in the browser. Chess24 is a new entrant to the market. They also have an excellent live server experience in the browser, but they have relatively few users at the moment. It will be interesting to see how Chess24 develops over the next year. I have rarely played onplaychess, but they also have a good web app.
My absolute favorite chess server which I am sadly not playing on is lichess, recommended by @achja. Lichess is a perfect chess server experience. It is a free server driven by an open conception of the internet. The interface is absolutely beautiful, and lichess is filled with great server features including support for Chess960 and pools. There are typically 1500+ players online, but there are not currently many strong GMs. For someone looking for a 'full service' chess site, I recommend chess.com because of all the added content and features such as blogs, articles, daily chess, etc. However, if you are simply looking for the best server around, you cannot go wrong with lichess.
FICS, the Free Internet Chess Club, has the best client support for LINUX. There are many clients available for FICS, but I would recommend using Jin. Many users, firstly @achja, have recommended Raptor for FICS.
Databases
ICOFY is a great free database with over 5,000,000 games. It is regularly updated, well stocked, and well documented and cleaned. It is available in SCID formats as well as pgn and Chessbase formats. For most players, I would look no further. If you want an absolutely top of the line database, I would look at OpeningMaster. OpeningMaster has over 8.7 million games. This includes 1.3 million correspondence games. OpeningMaster is not free, but it does support SCID and PGN formats. For some further thoughts on chess databases, and some recommendations for web based databases, see my article at http://www.chess.com/blog/SamCopeland/databases-tips-tricks-and-recommendations.
Tournament Direction
As a relatively new tournament director, I was initially very frustrated by the dominance of Windows only softwares in the US market. WinTD and SwissSys are the go tos. I am very happy to have found Vega. Vega is developed by Luigi Forlano primarily for use in Italian and European tournaments, but it does support USCF tournaments by supporting USCF Swiss System pairings and tiebreaks rules, allowing TDs to load the USCF player database, and creating dbf files for USCF tournament submission. To my mind, Vega has a better UI and a better workflow than SwissSys and WinTD. In the coming weeks, I hope to create a set of youtube tutorials for USCF TDs interested in Vega.
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NOTE: I try not to use wine because I prefer to support native solutions. That said, some programs work quite well with wine. For instance, the Windows version of Houdini runs smoothly in SCID vs. PC with wine installed. I have also had some success with Chess Position Trainer in wine. Typically, the older a Windows program is, the better supported it is in Wine. Some tournament direction softwares also work quite well.
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A chess game on FICS using an interface named Jin
The Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) is a volunteer-run Internet chess server. It was organised as a free alternative to the Internet Chess Club (ICC), after that site began charging for membership.[1]
History[edit]
FICS Banner.
The first Internet chess server, named the Internet Chess Server (ICS), started in January 1992. The software was coded, supported, and operated by volunteers until 1995, when administrators began charging players for membership and changed the name to ICC.[1]
Several former ICS programmers saw the commercialisation of ICS as an exploitation of their work. This group, led by Chris Petroff and Henrik Gram, developed FICS as an alternative to the paid model, giving users free, unrestricted access. The server debuted on 3 March 1995 (25 years ago).[2][3]
In 1998, the Free Internet Chess Organization (FICS) was organized as a nonprofit organization.[4]
In 2007, the legal entity was involuntarily dissolved. The server is still maintained and administered by volunteers. In 2016, 50,000 active players played a total of 23 million games.[4][5]
As of August 2014, FICS had over 650,000 registered accounts.[4]
Usage[edit]Connecting[edit]
FICS using BabasChess interface
Playing chess on FICS requires connecting to the server either through a web-based applet on the FICS website or else by using a client program, which could be as simple as a telnet client, but is usually an interface designed specifically for playing Internet chess.[6] Users can log in either as an anonymous guest or else by registering for a free account. Each user is permitted only one account. The server maintains rating and game statistics for registered users. FICS uses the Glicko rating system.[7]
Gameplay[edit]
Players can watch for game requests by other users broadcast or create their own seeks and wait for someone to respond. Seeks include time controls and frequently an optional ratings limit. Seeks can be programmed to be require manual acceptance by the user, or they can automatically be accepted by the player. Users can challenge specific players to a game by using the match command. Moves are made with a mouse on an image of a chess board or users can type in moves in algebraic chess notation. All games played by registered users are recorded by a computer and made publicly available.[4]
Time controls[edit]
Since the mechanics of play are simplified, chess games played online tend to use faster time controls than in over-the-board (OTB) play. Longer games (i.e., usually 15 or more minutes per player) are called standard and are also common on the server. Separate ratings are maintained for lightning (under 3 minutes), blitz (usually 5 or 10 minutes), and standard (over 15 minutes). Irregular variants, such as Fischer Random, are grouped together into a handful of formats like Wild, and these are not further classified by time controls.[4]
Fischer delay is popular: the time control is specified by two numbers, the minutes each player is allotted at the start of the game, and the seconds added to a player's clock after making a move (the increment). For example, in the popular 2–12 time controls, each player receives 2 minutes at the beginning of the game, and 12 seconds are added to a player's clock after they make a move. Since all games are assumed to last 40 moves for format classification purposes, 2–12 is grouped with 10-minutes-per-player (10=2+12*40/60).[citation needed]
The timeseal is a utility which allows the server to adjust for the effects of internet lag. Each move is time-stamped locally and the time is takes for each command to travel to the server is not deducted from the player's clock. This method of time stamping each move is helpful for players with slow internet connections. FICS does not track lag centrally and does not permit users to exclude persistent laggers.[4]
Interfaces[edit]
Mobile Interface
FICS is designed to be accessed by a chess interface designed to connect to Internet chess servers. Interfaces are created independently. FICS does not have an official interface and does not endorse any interface. The most popular interfaces for Windows are BabasChess, Jin, XBoard, Thief, and Raptor.[4] Mobialia Chess is the most common platform for mobile operating systems Android and IOS.
On other operating systems (mainly Unix-type boxes based on Linux or macOS), eboard, XBoard, PyChess, Jin, JavaBoard, and Raptor are popular choices. JavaBoard, JinApplet, and QXBoard are web interfaces that run in a web browser and have fewer features than other clients.[4][clarification needed]
In 2017, the Free Chess Club open-source project released a web-based client targeted towards modern web browsers using JavaScript, HTML5 and WebSockets.[8] In addition to a web interface, Free Chess Club provides a cross-platform desktop application that runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Channels[edit]
FICS has a number of very conservatively censored chat channels numbered 0 through 255. Many of the channels are reserved for administrators and bots.[4]
![]()
Some of the more popular channels include:
Registration is required for all channels except channels 1,4 and 53.
Some channels are used for FICS staff and cannot be seen by regular users:
A user can listen and send tells to up to thirty channels simultaneously. Another form of mass communication available to registered users is 'shouts' which can be seen by all connected users who haven't turned shouts off.[4]
Variants[edit]
Currently, the following chess variants are available on FICS, besides regular chess:
Tournaments on FICS[edit]
Tournaments are regularly organised or relayed on FICS.
![]() Mamer tournaments[edit]
Most tournaments are organised by 'Mamer,' an automated tournament director. Mamer is run by tourney managers who organize and supervise tournaments. Mamer announces tournaments through channel 49 and through tells and 'tshouts.' Tournaments organised by Mamer range in time controls and include variants.[4]
Other tournaments[edit]
Other regular conducted tournaments on FICS include tournaments featuring slow time controls (STC) of typically more than 45 minutes. Two of the most popular of these are FICS Teamleague, which uses 45 45 controls, and the Online Chess League (OCL), which uses 60 15 time controls. Both are team events with teams of 4 competing against each other, and each player typically plays one game per week. In addition, the STC Bunch, or the Slow Time Control Bunch, organised several tournaments with slow time controls.[4]
Relay[edit]
FICS relays major chess events. A bot takes the moves in ongoing games and relays them to special demo accounts on FICS. These demo accounts bear the names of the grandmasters playing in the event. Users and guests on FICS can watch the games in progress and chat about the games with each other. The relay has covered every single World Chess Championship since its inception. Other major relays include the yearly relay of Wijk aan Zee, Morelia-Linares and Amber Melody.[4]
See also[edit]References[edit]Raptor Chess Interface Alternatives For Mac Download
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Free_Internet_Chess_Server&oldid=972906905#Interfaces'
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