On-line Chess - Part 1.14 - Play everywher

Nowadays computers are not the only mean to reach internet. Cell phones, smart phones, iPhone, iPod, Wii and so on have access to internet. Big online chess providers know about this revolution and adapted their web sites to be reached from those devices. The cost is high for the provider and so it is difficult to find this feature for free. Typically there is an application to download on your portable device which is the client program. Even if the download is free, if you want to play often or affect your rating you should pay a fee.

Figure 12 – iPhone application provided by http://www.chess.com

Furthermore social networks counts thousands of people and give the possibility for developers to public their software to be used by social networks’ users. So if you want to play chess online you surely will find a way!

On-line Chess - Part 1.13 - Security

On a real chess game it is not possible to cheat. Online chess games instead can be cheated in several ways depending of the security model implemented. Yah, the server receives the information about the move and the timestamp from the clients. Nobody is able to see what the user is doing sitting in front of his/her PC. Let’s start from the most common cheating type: the computer aid. Instead of using their own brain, cheaters open a window on their PC where their favorite chess program is running. The position of the game in progress is replicated in the chess program and analyzed by the CPU (which will do the dirty job), the program hints the best move for every position and unlucky opponents can be defeated soon if not stronger than the machine. The consequence is that cheaters gain points rapidly and they will be at the top of the ladder even if not deserved. Is there a remedy for that? Some online game providers claim they have one. The principle is that suspicious games are analyzed with a computer engine and if there is a match that is the footprint of a cheat. Can anyone be sure 100% that it is a cheat? Difficult to say. Anyway other techniques can be added and the following three are just examples:

• The rating evolution is monitored because a quick rising of the rating is a symptom of good game but also of cheating. 
• The suspect cheater is notified by a message encouraging him/her to stop cheating or simply informing that from now on a strict monitoring will be performed on his/her games. 
• The suspect cheater is marked so that every user knows what could happen if they accept a challenge from a suspect cheater. 
• The number of times the game is suspended is monitored. It could be an indication that the player is using the time to query a chess program.

When the cheater is confirmed he/she is banned from using the chess service.
Another popular way to gain points is to play against yourself. Cheaters create two accounts and winning against themselves let them improve their rating. Some game providers overcome this techniques by force the users at registration time to accept to not create more than one account otherwise they will be banned. Some other game providers instead have tools to detect if the players of a game come from the same IP address. What if the cheater uses two different PC?
  Another historical way to cheat an opponent is to interrupt the game when thing is going bad on the board. Let’s think the case there is a temporary connection failure of a client. Some game providers simply null the game because they think it is unfair to assign a result in this case. But cheaters could turn off their computer in order to simulate an internet connection failure. Usually providers face this problem in two ways:

• adjourning the game when accidental disconnection has happened and give the chance to reconnect in order to complete the game 
• declaring the victory for the player remained online

Other providers claim they have an intelligent system able to recognize abusive game interruptions, which is the best solution to the problem.
Now let’s have a look at complex cheating techniques. As we already said, the client program sends a time stamp together with the move up to the server. Time stamp could be modified to get more time. Usually the connection between the client and the server is encrypted but even the most famous chess server (ICC) has not a strong protection against hackers that could decrypt the message and change the time stamp.

On-line Chess - Part 1.12 - Customizations

As a user of the game service you have the chance to customize the interface you use to play. Type of chess pieces and colors of white and dark squares of the board are examples of personal settings.

 Figure 11 – www.chess.com board settings

Another common one is the automatic pawn promotion to queen. Even if sometimes there are not so many choices this features in nice to have. The move highlight is useful when you want to see quickly what the opponent move is when you come back to your monitor. Other minor settings are the movement of the piece when you move or the alert sounds.

On-line Chess - Part 1.11 - Analysis

Your games are stored in a database so they are available to all people to inspect and comment. Analyzing games is useful for improvements and on-line gaming providers allow their users to have this feature. How? In several ways. First of all the user can post the game to a forum and wait for someone to review and comment. Simple and effective, because when a lot of people could analyze your game and so the amount of data produced could be very interesting, with no cost for the provider. The drawback is that it could happen no one wants to review your game or the reviewers are not good enough. Sometimes there is a committee entitled for reviewing the games when required. In this case the guys in the committee should be prepared enough for producing good quality comments. Another scenario is the help of a computer program. Your game is put in queue and it will wait to be processed by a chess engine. This solution has a cost in terms of hardware resources to guarantee the service to every user, while the chess engine could be open Source. Other commercial chess engines, like Fritz for instance, perform better analysis so someone prefers to download the PGN format of the game and run his/her favorite chess engine for a deep analysis.

Analysis is good for training but is lesser amusing than reviewing the game with your opponent at the end of a match, still in front of the chessboard with the clock still warm. Ok, the quality of the analysis is poor but you still have your variants in your mind and would like to see the reaction of the opponent.