Chesscafé?! -+

[Offramp]

Does anyone here remember a site called https://chesscafe.com/ ? I used to visit there on average about once a day. There were some really good articles there.

I remember that things started to go downhill shortly after Tony Miles died. His regular column was replaced by a piece of nonsense called Chess Mazes, which was I think for children or people in prison.

Now the site is behind a concrete paywall. They want $25 a year for their little Chess Mazes and articles such as "PLAY LIKE ELOI RELANGE!" LOL who?

It's possible that the site has been essentially abandoned by its owner. It's an example of failing to move with the times.

[Rainer]

There was some useful discussion at the chess.com forums. Just google
"chess.com chesscafe". The bottom line seems to be that they are
essentially out of business but some of their content is available for
free through archive.org's time machine.

Cheers,
Rainer

[raylopez99]

On Sunday, July 3, 2016 at 9:07:35 AM UTC+3, Offramp wrote:

> It's possible that the site has been essentially abandoned by its owner. It's an example of failing to move with the times.

You may not be aware that 'the times' for most chess players below 2700 is essentially to play as an amateur. There's no money to be made in chess, either publishing, sponsoring, or playing. See the book by UK GM K. Arkell, excerpt here: "http://en.chessbase.com/post/55-and-fabulous-an-interview-with-keith-arkell"

Off-topic to offramp's question: whatever happened to Taylor Kingston!? LOL.

RL

[vtview...@gmail.com]

>
> Off-topic to offramp's question: whatever happened to Taylor Kingston!? LOL.
>
> RL

I wrote to Taylor after he moved to CA.

Chess cafe was one of 3 or 4 US based chess sites which had reasonable chess playing articles for mid level players about actually playing chess, plus a forum. The forum had its usual dozen main voices, and they liked what they liked, to such degree that they killed it by disliking all outside their group. On the whole they were not stronger players, just strongly opinionated conservatives.

Otherwise the magazine went the same way ∏ having had sales rights for USCF, there was then a dispute and without any other income the owner declined further subsidy of the site.

Phil Innes

[raylopez99]

On Saturday, July 9, 2016 at 8:01:48 PM UTC+3, vtview...@gmail.com wrote:

> Otherwise the magazine went the same way ∏ having had sales rights for USCF, there was then a dispute and without any other income the owner declined further subsidy of the site.

OK. Do you make money from chess teaching? Or is it more of a hobby?

RL

[vtview...@gmail.com]

I have written the first and still only high-school accredited chess course in the USA which I teach by distance learning. Instead of Latin II you could do chess and get the same credit!

Phil