Short Answer:
Real money chess doesn’t work well online because of the difficulty in enforcing the rules of the game. Even inexpensive chess programs can be used to simulate expert levels of play. All one has to do is load up a copy of any decent chess simulator and input the opponent’s moves into that program. This basically leaves the opponent playing against an expert-level computer.
- My great fail is that I cannot learn opening or initial play. Normally I only play when I can connect to my mobile app (Chess Free on iOS), and play at a very low level (adjusted as a single bar), and repeat that level until I have some domain of it.Unlike a human player or a friend, that sort of games cannot teach me which are the errors I am repeating consistently (some adaptive app?).
- Chess World Championship betting is available from many online sportsbooks. You can bet winners of individual matches or choose a draw as the outcome. There’s also the option of betting on the overall winner of the Championship.
- Play chess online for free on Chess.com with over 50 million members from around the world. Have fun playing with friends or challenging the computer!
- In terms of apps, other than the good suggestions made so far, I definitely recommend most of 'Chess King' apps, and specifically for openings. Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000).
Chess World Championship betting is available from many online sportsbooks. You can bet winners of individual matches or choose a draw as the outcome. There’s also the option of betting on the overall winner of the Championship.
But, you can play chess online for free with relatively little trouble. There are plenty of chess sites that host tournaments and keep track of your rankings online. No real money is involved, but these sites do offer a lot in the way of practice, training material, socializing and competition for bragging rights.
These are the three most popular multiplayer chess sites, ranked in order of their popularity and prestige:
There are a lot of other chess sites on the internet, but these are generally recognized as the best for serious students of the game. If you do a little research, you’ll see that most chess aficionados respect these sites the most.
Long Answer:
Chess is one of my longtime favorite games. The strategy implications are so deep that you can spend a lifetime mastering the game. In chess, there is no hidden information other than the intentions of your opponent. There are no hidden cards, chance outcomes based on dice or anything of that nature. Everything you need sits before you on the board in plain sight.
People do play chess for real money. It is inevitable that a game as competitive as chess will involve money to some degree. Chess tournaments around the world give out significant prizes to the winners. Private games often involve wagers on the outcome.
But unfortunately, real money chess does not translate well to the internet. The biggest problem with online chess is that it is too easy to get help with outside programs. There is no easy way around this so there is not a single place on the internet where you can play chess for any significant money.
Cheating at Online Chess
You know how above I said that all the information you need in chess is available right in front of you on the board? Well, that is the game’s greatest downfall when it comes to the internet. Computer programmers have already solved the game of chess.
Even simple games like Chessmaster are capable of playing at extremely high levels. Set Chessmaster to the highest difficulty level and you’ll have a digital opponent who can beat all but the most elite chess players.
This makes it all too easy to cheat at chess online. All you have to do is fire up a second computer, turn on Chessmaster, set it to the hardest difficulty setting and then input all of your opponent’s moves to the game. The computer will respond with the most strategically correct move and you can then mimic those moves when playing against other people online.
Right now, we have no solution for that problem. Some websites in the past have required you to install software that prevents outside programs from running on your computer. The problem with that is you can just use a different computer to run a chess program.
The only way you can play chess with other people and know for sure that they aren’t cheating is to play those people in person. Cheating isn’t much of a problem at free chess sites because most of the people there are serious students of the game. But if you add money to the mix, the incentive to cheat suddenly becomes powerful.
So for now, it’s not realistic to play chess online for real money. Gamecolony.com does have real money games and a section devoted to chess, but I wouldn’t recommend going that route. The only possible method of detecting cheaters is to watch for players who make strategically perfect decisions every time. In that case, you are relying on the site’s security department to keep everything on the up-and-up.
Personally, I stay away from real money chess online. The risks of cheating are too real to make it worthwhile. And even if the risk of cheating doesn’t concern you, it surely concerns enough other people that you’ll have a hard time finding matches and making any decent money.
The Alternative
If you have an interest in real money online chess, you might want to try poker instead. Poker is a deeply strategic game and you can play online for as much or as little money as you want. Skilled players do make a lot of money playing online.
Cheating isn’t nearly as problematic for poker because there is enough hidden information that computers cannot effectively solve the game. Every person plays poker differently + you play against multiple opponents at a time. I’ve heard of people setting up bots to play poker, but those bots are ineffective in comparison to just learning how to play a smart game.
Poker does have an element of chance in the short run, but it is still a skill-based game. The best poker players consistently make money with poker. I can tell you this from firsthand experience. I played poker all through college and made enough money to pay off my student loans and live comfortably.
Give poker a shot. There is enough strategy in this game that you can spend a lifetime improving your skills. Some of the best poker players in the world earn millions of dollars a year at the tables. Sure, you’ll have bad days where the cards seem to always fall in favor of your opponents but over the long run, skilled players win.
Tagged with: chess
It seems at times, when this column’s first lines are a struggle, that it might be useful to have some catalogue of movements and plots to fall back on.
Instead, all I have is this weak rhetorical manoeuvre – a very bad joke about openings – to start a piece about chess.
2020 has been an interesting year for the ancient strategy game, one that hints at a different kind of future. Look closely, and it has relevance elsewhere for a changing sports industry.
There have been two recent surges in popular interest. The first came early in the pandemic crisis, where countries fell like dominoes – if the metaphors don’t match, then mix them – into one lockdown after another. Google Trends showed a bounce in searches for ‘chess’ and related terms, like ‘learn chess’, while websites strained to keep pace with the rate of new registrations and online play among those stuck at home.
From March to the end of August – according to SullyGnome data, by way of a report in the New York Times – 41.2 million hours of chess were watched on Twitch, more than quadrupling consumption across the previous six months. In the same New York Times article, David Llada, chief marketing and communications officer at the International Chess Federation (FIDE), says the number of daily online games rose from 11 million in January to about 16 or 17 million by the middle of the year.
The second rush, in the last couple of months, says some fascinating things about both the position of chess and the interconnectedness of digital media, entertainment, status and play.
Based on a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, The Queen’s Gambit has since late October become one of Netflix’s biggest in-house hits. The streaming giant’s numbers are always a little hard to get a read on – selectively released and esoteric, with two minutes’ watch time enough to count as a viewing household – but the response to Beth Harmon’s fictional adventures across 64 squares is still pretty remarkable. In the 28 days after its launch, the show was seen in 62 million households. It was number one on the platform in 63 countries and reached the top ten in another 29.
Those Google spikes have returned and multiplied, closely tracking enquiries about the series itself. ‘Chess’ has hit a 14-year high worldwide and seen particular growth – unsurprisingly – in English-speaking markets with big Netflix audiences. Chess.com added 378,000 members in a week in mid-March. In the third quarter of November, it was adding over 100,000 a day. More than 3.2 million have joined since The Queen Gambit debuted. The website is riding the wave by letting users play against Beth Harmon bots, taking on Anna Taylor-Joy’s heroine at different stages of her prodigious on-screen development.
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Sales of chess sets soared through November, with toymakers like Goliath Games, and trading sites like eBay and Etsy registering exponential increases in demand. At the top end, hand-crafted wooden sets are also sought after – a board made to last has aspirational cachet.
Indeed, the impact of The Queen’s Gambit reiterates what is universal about chess – a language of rules and aesthetics that most of us can easily recognise, even if we don’t speak it very well. That underscores the challenge and the opportunity facing chess as a business, the same pair facing many sports poised just on the shoulder of popular culture. Casual attachment among a big, vague mass can drive surges in attention but it takes a core following to keep it all alive in the meantime.
The World Chess Championship has served as a similar demonstration for decades. The average non-chess fan might expect to identify three or four Grand Masters – Bobby Fischer and his great Cold War rival Boris Spassky, Garry Kasparov and the current world champion, Magnus Carlsen – and then resign. The biennial set-piece that made those names is almost the sole event that generates mainstream coverage.
In the mono-media era just passed it was hard to close the gap, not least financially, between those peaks and the income needed to sustain a competitive ecosystem. Economic models powered by digital communities are different, and chess may be able to follow the examples of quite separate categories of games. But progress will demand careful deliberation.
A couple of years ago in London, in what was once Central St Martins College, I dropped in on the World Chess Championship match between Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana of the US. In an upstairs VIP lounge, as the main event played out cautiously on surrounding screens, guests sipped coffees and vodka cocktails over games of their own. The whole thing had its own kind of cerebral glamour, like some clique of PhD students had opened an upmarket speakeasy.
It was there that I spent an entertaining half an hour in the company of Ilya Merenzon, chief executive of promoter World Chess. His role and that of his company in chess have been the source of some debate, and he talked big, but there was substance in the ideas he proposed.
Technology can be the basis of a lot of very smart tools. Chess was the gold standard, for years, for tests of artificial intelligence, so that is an obvious source of inspiration. It is easy to make sense of a service that helps players find opponents of comparable ability. Smart training software, or programmes that emulate the greats, has a similar case. The difficulty, however, lies in concentrating enough of the chess fraternity in one space to make digitisation viable at scale.
FIDE believes that chess apps have been downloaded on to smartphones around a billion times. The obvious follow-up questions concern the number of apps, by the number of users. Historically, the governing body has had its own problems realising the game’s commercial promise. Lots of those involve the sports governance classics – alleged corruption in a small but high-grade community – and really merit explanation in a whole other column.
In July 2018 Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Russia was replaced as FIDE president, after 23 years, by compatriot Arkady Dvorkovich, who has clawed back some commercial rights from companies like Merenzon’s Agon. ESPN reported last week that 2021’s World Chess Championship in Dubai, between Carlsen and a to be determined challenger, could be the first to carry a title sponsor.
Still, capitalising on the potential of chess will be a taxing process. The game is competing, among others, with its own superstar lead – Carlsen has a broad portfolio of personal endorsements and a burgeoning suite of properties in his name. Early in November, his Play Magnus Group agreed a deal with Eurosport for the rights in 60 territories to the online, US$1.5 million Champions Chess Tour. The Norwegian rights had already gone to NRK and TV2. Digital subscription packages are bundled with chess24 membership and heavily promote the Play Magnus Carlsen teaching app.
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It will be intriguing to see what comes of all this, and instructive. There are many of us who develop no more than a passing curiosity in chess, and some who might just want to get a little better at it. Then there is that core who find a lifelong obsession. For them, there are always deeper rabbit-holes to explore: more games to play, more ideas to discuss, more to read and watch and understand.
On the surface, that’s all a community model is. If you can corral that energy in more or less a single direction, and provide the right value to different categories of fans, you have at a good part of what it will take to flourish in the next decade or two. Of course, like chess, it all gets more complicated in the detail.
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There are paths to success. The fear for a lot of sports right now is that they are approaching something like endgame, and the pieces are not in their favour. What that really means, to look at it another way, is that the board is about to be reset.