Correspondence Chess - Regulatory Bodies of Correspondence Chess

Regulatory Bodies of Correspondence Chess

Correspondence chess tournaments are usually played under the auspices of an official regulatory body, most importantly International Correspondence Chess Federation (ICCF), which is affiliated with FIDE, the international chess organization. However, the ICCF, which organizes postal and email events, is not the only organization involved in correspondence chess. There are numerous national and regional bodies for postal chess, as well as a number of organisations devoted to organize email play for free such as the International Email Chess Group (IECG), the Free Internet Correspondence Games Server (FICGS), that also runs a world championship cycle, and International E-mail Chess Club (IECC). However, groups other than the ICCF are not sanctioned by FIDE.

The ICCF awards the titles International Master, Senior International Master and International Correspondence Chess Grandmaster — these are equivalent to similar titles awarded by FIDE for over-the-board chess. The ICCF also runs the World Correspondence Chess Championships. Because these events can last a long time, they may overlap: for instance, in February 2005 Joop van Oosterom was declared winner of the eighteenth Championship (which began in June 2003), though the winner of the seventeenth Championship (which began in March 2002) had not yet been determined.

Up until 2004, ICCF correspondence chess was played only via email and postal mail. For playing by these two forms of transmission, the ICCF developed their own game notation, known as the ICCF numeric notation, especially for the purpose of ICCF correspondence chess.

In recent years, the use of increasingly powerful chess programs have brought forth new challenges for organizations like the ICCF and the U.S. Chess Federation, necessitating sometimes controversial decisions on the admissibility of such programs in official correspondence play.

Moreover, the emergence of the Internet has brought new opportunities for correspondence chess, not all of which are organized by official bodies. Casual correspondence chess includes correspondence play initiated through correspondence chess servers and games played between individuals who meet and play on their own. Casual correspondence play does not lead to official ratings, though some chess servers will calculate ratings for the players based on results on that server.