Advanced Chess - Advanced Chess On The Internet

Advanced Chess On The Internet

The ubiquity of the Internet and a high number of commercial and free Internet chess servers has made it possible for anyone to play Advanced Chess over the Internet. There has not been organized Internet Advanced Chess play in quite a while, though, and few Internet chess systems have regulated rated Advanced Chess play.

The world's largest organization for Advanced Chess on the Internet is the Advanced Chess Organization - CCO (this organization used to be known as Computer Chess Organization, and therefore kept the acronym CCO for historical reasons). CCO organizes regular Advanced Chess events, most of which take place on The Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) or the correspondence website http://www.cowplay.com. One need not be a CCO member to participate in its tournaments, though the organization stresses that membership is highly desirable. CCO Advanced Chess events on the Internet usually employ unrated play, because rated Advanced Chess play is still unregulated by most Internet chess systems, and use of computers in rated games is considered cheating and ruled out. CCO proposes that Internet chess servers introduce a third category of player - the "Advanced Chess player", among the existing human and computer players, latter of which usually labeled by "(C)", and that Advanced Chess players should be associated with a special Advanced Chess rating category. CCO points out that most Internet chess servers already have software-driven mechanisms which allow players to choose the types of the opponents they wish to play, therefore making it possible for a particular player to exclude all Advanced Chess players, should he/she not wish to play them.

The trend might be changing as Advanced Chess is offered on the correspondence chess server at FICGS as the default mode of play, with special, unrated, "no engines" tournaments being the exception, rather than the rule.