The Kasparov vs. the World online chess game, which began June 21, 1999, has united chess players of all skill levels from around the world in a cooperative effort against the reigning world chess champion. With more than 50,000 individuals submitting move votes, Kasparov vs. the World on MSN.com has been one of the largest interactive gaming events in history.
The quality of the chess played throughout the Kasparov vs. the World game has been acknowledged by chess experts and third parties around the world as one of the best public chess games ever documented.
MSN.com and the MSN.com Gaming Zone will continue to host the archive site for this event at . The site contains a complete history of moves, all analyst recommendations and Danny King commentaries, photographs of various members of the world team, press releases and exclusive articles on the world of chess. Soon the site will also feature commentary and analysis from Kasparov and more information about the game from Microsoft.
A couple of years ago I looked at chess games for Windows Phone, looking specifically at playing against the phone's AI and not human opponents. I promised then that I'd do a follow-up or two looking at playing other people online - and here's the first!*
Winning at chess is almost actually easier than figuring out this UWP game for Windows 10, as in how 'Chess Online' fits in with the ChessFriends.com site. Is it the official application for W10 or a third party web wrapper and if the latter does it get a cut from any in-app-purchases? And so on. Regardless, it's a fast and fun way to get going in the world of online chess, you set your own opponent parameters and then see who bites!
Playing chess against another human being is a very different proposition to playing a computer, of course. For starters, the human will make mistakes and won't necessarily play the 'obvious' move; secondly, they'll generally play at a lower level (and thus are defeatable!); and finally, there's always a timer (a chess clock) involved, as a way of making sure that you can't just sit and think for ages on a move while your opponent waits and gets more and more frustrated.
In all my testing here, I found myself happiest playing with around 7 or 8 minutes per player for all their moves. Faster than this and I usually ran out of time (my brain isn't as fast as it was!) in a lengthy game, longer than 10 minutes and each game can then be up to 20 minutes, which may be longer than the period of time I was willing to invest in this 'real time' chess session.**
Although available for Windows Phone 8.1 before it (and still in the Store), Windows 10 Mobile phones get served this version up, a full UWP that also works with Continuum displays and on laptops, etc. The styling is very 'iOS' throughout, perhaps indicating the desire by the programmers of the chess system on ChessFriends.com to mimic in HTML5 what they'd already done for the iPhone client.
Searching for an opponent that matches your chosen time and rating allowances can be lightning quick (if you haven't been too fussy and at certain busier times of day) or it can be slow (say, 30 seconds, if youve been more particular and if it's the middle of the night in the Eastern continents, especially). But with thousands of people typically online at once there's always someone to play when you get that urge to pit yur chess wits against another human(!)
Chess Titans is a chess video game with 3D graphics developed by Oberon Games and included in Windows Vista and Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. It is a fully 3D animated, photorealistic interactive chess game with ten difficulty levels when played against the computer. It can be played by two participants, or one player against the computer.[1]
Another chess program by Microsoft known simply as Chess was bundled in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 4 for earlier versions of Windows in 1992.[3] It was developed by David Norris, a former Microsoft employee and author of the chess engine "Ziggurat".[4]
The game is fully animated and designed for demonstrating the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities of the earlier Windows Presentation Foundation in Windows Vista. The game features a photorealistic board which can be rotated in 3D,[5] and themes are available for the chess pieces and board. The game showcases the 3D capabilities of Vista on the desktop.[6]
On each player's turn, Chess Titans displays the last move made by the opponent. The player can also click on a chess piece to highlight all valid moves for that piece. These features can be turned off in the Options dialog box.
HIARCS Chess Explorer Pro is a new highly advanced chess database, analysis and playing program for PC Windows computers. It offers a very powerful user interface with the strongest ever HIARCS chess engine and world class chess database features. This advanced software supports major chess database formats from Chessbase CBH and CBV files, the chess standard PGN and the new fast and powerful HCE format which supports huge databases only limited by memory. Move your chess forward with the best chess software for PC Windows. This unique combination offers easy to use features managing chess databases, preparation, analysis, play and training for players of all abilities from beginner to Grandmasters and beyond.
August 2023 v1.2: New chess engines, opening books and databases.
HIARCS Chess Explorer is the established best chess software for chess database, analysis and game playing on PC Windows. It offers an intuitive graphical user interface with powerful features together with the World Chess Software Champion HIARCS 14 chess engine. The product is refreshingly easy to use and includes many features for managing chess databases, chess preparation, analysis and training for players of all abilities from beginner to Grandmaster.
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