Play against the Computer...this is MindTheCheck!

MindTheCheck has a strong chess engine among its users and now you can play chess with it! The engine is the famous Sockfish, one of the strongest ever.

Why Stockfish? Here are the reasons:

• it's open source;
• it supports UCI protocol;
• it has several skill levels.

UCI protocol makes the SW integration easy so a number of engines are based on this protocol (e.g. Shredder).
However, the free Shredder version (1.5) does not permit to change the skill level while Stockfish does, futhermore Stockfish has 20 different skill levels.

Is MindTheCheck equipped with a dedicated server for the chess engine?
No, it isn't. Instead there are several clients acting as an engine. The "Computer" is a MindTheCheck's user which connects to the website and stays available to play as long as it gets disconnected.
Clients balance the load: each engine instance will play one or more games at the same time. When a client disconnects, another client with less load at that moment will take over.

Playing is easy and quick, if you can't find any human opponent online, you will train yourself with the computer now.

First Round Robin Tournament

The upcoming  MtC event is scheduled to start on December 11th 2013! Its nickname is RRT (which stands for Round Robin Turn-based tournament) and it is the first double Round-Robin tournament, with rated turn-based games (we recall: the time for one move is 30 days). The tournament will start with no more then 8 partecipants and with at least 6! Pairings are made with Berger criteria and in case the number of registrations is odd, Anonymous will be the dummy partecipant. Tie break are handled using the Sonneborg-Berger, that is by adding scores of the opponents who were beaten by a given player and half the scores of the opponents who she drew with.

1^ Unrated SoM

MindTheCheck is pleased to announce the first Set Of Matches event!
Users will be able to register starting from May 21th and the event remains open for registration till June 10th.
The first SoM consists of up to 4  unrated turn-based chess games each player and it is a way to meet people on the virtual board and exploit the MindTheCheck features like the post-game analysis.
Unrated chess games do not alter the player ELO rating so people are free to play without worry too much about mistakes.
Turn-based games have very large time constraint (30 days timeout each move) so it gives players enough time to play a good game.

So, have nice games with MtC events!

MindTheCheck's events

MindTheCheck is about to open a new section dedicated to events, such as tournaments and series of matches. Every registered user will be able to participate in these events, always FREE.
The section is still experimental, but would allow players to meet each other.

The first MtC event will be of type SoM (Set of Matches), ie a set of turn-based chess matches to a maximum of 4 matches per player. Each event will be accompanied by a special web space in order to monitor the progress of the event and ranking. The first SoM is friendly (unrated), ie the matches do not contribute to change the player's ELO rating: a way to socialize with the most active users of the Club.

When will be possible to apply to a new event, users will be notified by email. Among their settings it will be added an option to disable this service for those who does not want to receive this type of information.

Stay tuned, therefore, the first event of MindTheCheck is coming soon...