How to Win at Live Chess

Chess.com's LIVE CHESS is reaching the end of its testing period and will soon be with us, so it's time to share some experiences gleaned during my wanderings on the Web.

For the past five years I've been playing Internet chess. It has all the convenience of playing from home, finding opponents of your own strength and chatting with people around the world. I've spoken to Russian lawyers, Chinese soldiers, Antarctic scientists, and just about everybody else you could name.

I started with the Kasparov Chess Club, moved on to World Chess Network (which was taken over by ICC and renamed World Chess Live) then found a home here at Chess.com.

Of course, the type of chess you play on the Internet is a bit different to club chess. It's neither as intense nor as serious. Lots of very quick moves get played, sometimes with disastrous results. Sometimes they're just plain funny—whether they happen to you or to your opponent.

If FIDE developed a black box game recorder to capture comments used by Internet players whose games had just crashed, I think the word most frequently recorded would be, "Oops!"

The article already appears on the Internet and, since there are 16 hints accompanied by 16 brevities, it's more convenient to link to them than to reproduce them here.

You can play through them here: http://tinyurl.com/2soae5