Premium-only brother website

Hello,

I'd like to suggest that chess.com opens a companion website (chess-vip.com ?), with the same features than the current one, but with access exclusively to premium members.

I think this would increase the quality of the premium membership by offering better forums, better overall atmosphere and less cheating (having to pay to cheat is a good filter).

This move would make me reconsider premium membership. What do premium members think ?

I think it would be good, were it not for that it would gut a lot of groups, including the national teams (and thus the World League, etc). It would make it nearly impossible for smaller countries to compete even in their own divisions.

There is already the option to accept games only from premium members, make premium-member only tournaments and groups, and such.

For me, and hoping to not sound like a shill for Chess.com here, I would say there are already very many benefits for premium membership, especially the diamond level. Of course, it depends on what you are likely to use. I use almost everything that the site offers.

how that usually goes: vast majority of people choose to participate on the "main" site anyway, just because there are more players.

if something like that is to happen, they should just go all the way and make this premium-only. there would be protests and crying for some amount of time, but people eventually just let go :p

i guess they could add something like that in live. good luck

No, but the idea is that premium members would get full access to both sites. So if there's not enough people for an activity in the premium only site (like live chess for example), you could just go to the general website.

And yes, I wouldn't expect the premium site to have many members, but hopefully, the overall quality of the contents would be much higher. I would see it as a kind of 'quiet chess place'

@David : I would sometimes appreciate to have an option to filter forum contents for 'premium members only'

I think that would be a good way to fight against cheating as well. Having to pay is a deterrent to many ordinary cheats (cf. ICC for example). Besides, if there are more people on the general site, I would expect cheaters to go play there as a way to find victims more easily and quicker.

Premium members CAN do it in live

exactly!

general website is more crowded -> premiums go there anyway
premiums go there anyway -> premiums area pretty empty

i want to play, where do i go? general area, because there's tons more people and i'll get games faster.
i have a random chess question, where do i post it? in the general area and just ignore the troll comments.

one way to encourage forum activity in the premium area would be to hire some titled players to answer your questions there or something.

o rly? :p that sounds good enough.

There's a section in the forums that only premium members can post in: it's called 'Premium Members'. Anyone can view it though.

Well, if I take the example of ICC, the live section works pretty well with no more than a couple thousands members. I'm pretty sure chess.com has more premium members than ICC, so I would expect a premium-only chess.com website to work correctly on its own.

If I have the choice between playing in a pool of 12000 players with 10% cheaters and 2000 players with 1% cheaters (just maing up the figures for illustrative purposes of course), I'd chose the second one, even if I have to wait 2-3 minutes to get a long game

At the moment, I'm back on ICC for playing purposes, because I'm tired to run into an engine every second day I play an offbeat game in live. It's almost impossible to play a +1500 tournament in live at standard time-control without meeting at least one cheater !

As for the forums, well, the good stuff is buried under a mass of nonsense, and as you can't filter for your friends' content (would be a nice feature too), you're bound to read lots of crap before finding something sensible...

Yes, true : I discovered it only recently. Maybe I should check if this forum is 'cleaner' than the others ?!

I don't think that would be a good idea. I enjoy the contributions made by non-premium members here, and the playing pool would decrease by a huge amount. Being able to show up money is not a very good indicator of friendly contributions .

I can't help but notice that you're not a premium member as well, but I  enjoy your blog, it would be a shame to lose your forum and blog posts :)

Why are you guys so so focused on cheaters?
I find it not only hilarious, but also ridiculous how much time people spend on this site talking about it, analysing potential cheaters etc.. If you put 50% of that time into improving your own game.. Boy..

Besides, it's not as if you lose anything by playing a computer operated human. The rating you will get back if you truly are deserving of it, the mistakes you made will still teach you valuable lessons..  

Yeah, I don't expect cheaters to start popping up (and even then, rarely) until I reach 2300 online and 2000 on live standard, which seems like a very distant future at the moment. Even at those heights, I think dwelling on that little possibility as a player is a waste of energy and time, though it should be taken very seriously by those who run the site. And I trust that they do.

I'd probably never go to the premium site. A helluva lot of value comes from free members here. I think I checked out the premium forum once, I've never deliberately seeked it out after that.

Perhaps the problem is not so much with cheaters, as with your own attitude towards the game.. When did it become more important for you to win your games than to become a better, stronger, more potent player?

Hey I agree, even though I am only trying to bignote myself as a non paying member

Well, I disagree. First I lose my time (especially in online games), and second, the mistakes punished by computer play are more or less unrelated to the mistakes I need to correct when I play against humans.

And last, it makes it impossible to play longer games of course.

I'm very happy to lose against a human player. This is usually a good learning experience.

I'm not sure theres any evidence of a lower % of cheats amongst premium than freebie members. & given the posts stating the premium forum is essentially the same as the open forum. Where does that leave the idea to pay for chess-vip.com. Is there anything behind the rather grandiose title.

True, there's no evidence, but I take the ICC model as an example. My experience having played over 6 years on both sites is that there are less cheaters on ICC than on chess.com and I think one of the reasons is simply because ICC is subscribers-only.

The premium forums would probably benefit from having the same structure than the overall forum.

Basically there are 3 sets of services/functions on chess.com you pay for :

• teaching/training material : here the subscription gives a big+, no doubt
• community environment (forums/groups) : not a lot of advantages - you can create premium-only groups (well ok, but you can as well select your members by hand), and you have this premium forum which filters a little but isn't neatly organized as the main forum is
• playing environment : here, I'm not sure you have much - I haven't looked closely at it but is it possible to send premium-only challenges in online and live chess ? And you can't play long-time control live tournaments because you're basically running into cheaters all the time, so you're left with 3 0 chess (yeah...)

Is cheating really that common in live chess that you think it's not worth playing? I know my live ratings isn't very high (and I haven't met too many cheaters in online chess), but I have never had the impression that there are many cheaters there.