The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a commercial Internet chess server

Internet chess server

An Internet chess server is an external server that provides the facility to play, discuss, and view the board game of chess over the Internet...

 devoted to the play and discussion of chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 and chess variant

Chess variant

A chess variant is a game related to, derived from or inspired by chess. The difference from chess might include one or more of the following:...

s. ICC currently has over 30,000 subscribing members. It was the first Internet chess server and is the first and largest pay to play

Pay to Play

Pay to play, sometimes pay for play, is a phrase used for a variety of situations in which money is exchanged for services or the privilege to engage in certain activities...

 chess server.

History

The first Internet chess server

Internet chess server

An Internet chess server is an external server that provides the facility to play, discuss, and view the board game of chess over the Internet...

 (ICS), programmed by Michael Moore and Richard Nash, was launched on 15 January 1992. Players logged in by telnet

TELNET

Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...

, and the board was displayed as ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

 text. Bugs in the server software allowed illegal moves, false checkmates etc. Over time more and more features were added to ICS, such as Elo ratings

Elo rating system

The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor....

 and a choice of graphical interfaces

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

. 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 (darooha) 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 1 March 1995, Sleator announced his intentions to commercialize ICS, renaming it the Internet Chess Club, or ICC, and charging a yearly membership fee. The membership is free for players with a Grandmaster

Grandmaster

Grandmaster or Grand Master may refer to:In positions:*Grand Master , the head of various orders**Grand Masters of the Knights Templar**List of Grand Masters of the Knights Hospitaller**Grand Masters of the Teutonic Knights...

 or International Master title.

Some 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

Free Internet Chess Server

The Free Internet Chess Server is a volunteer-run Internet chess server. It was organised as a free alternative to the Internet Chess Club , after that site began charging for membership.-History:...

 (FICS), which to this day continues to allow everyone to access all features for free.

On 29 May 2007, the World Chess Network

World Chess Network

The World Chess Network was a commercial Internet chess server devoted to the play and discussion of chess that launched in 1997 and closed ten years later in 2007 when it was bought by Internet Chess Club and merged with Chess Live to form World Chess Live...

 was bought by the Internet Chess Club. It was then merged with Chess Live

Chess Live

Chess Live, formerly called US Chess Live , was a subscription Internet chess server that opened on August 8, 2000 and closed on 29 May 2007 when it was bought by Internet Chess Club and merged with World Chess Network to form World Chess Live.-Membership:There were three membership options:...

, another Internet chess server acquired by Internet Chess Club from GamesParlor. The result of the acquisition and merger was the formation of World Chess Live, a new Internet chess server that merged features of both services.

Software

ICC provides the proprietary BlitzIn software, currently at version 3.0.3, and the Dasher program, currently at version 1.5.3 The software has functions to try to detect players using the assistance of chess programs. It does this by detecting changes in window input focus, and the names of matching processes to known chess programs. For a positive match, both criteria need to be met. It also detects if a non-FIDE titled player has a high percentage of its moves matching up with known computer programs. Also, ICC has paid employees to detect computer cheating.

There are other software front-ends which work with the ICC system including a number of Java Applet interfaces which allow full-featured play via a browser.

Services available

• chess games against other members or computers
• a player rating system
• live broadcast of tournaments with grandmaster
  International Grandmaster
  The title Grandmaster is awarded to strong chess players by the world chess organization FIDE. Apart from World Champion, Grandmaster is the highest title a chess player can attain....
  
   commentary
• watch games involving titled players
• challenge grandmasters in simultaneous exhibitions
• libraries of games
• recorded lectures
• private lessons (at additional cost)
• chat channels on both chess and non-chess topics
• broadcasts on Chess.FM

Criticism

The commercialisation of ICC was extensively criticised by users, particularly that Daniel Sleator was charging a subscription to use a system that had been developed by others. Following complaints by students they were offered a 50% discount. The security of the system was criticised in December 2005 with claims that communications between ICC and users could easily be read and that the timestamp

Timestamp

A timestamp is a sequence of characters, denoting the date or time at which a certain event occurred. A timestamp is the time at which an event is recorded by a computer, not the time of the event itself...

ing could be defeated.