Online Chess

I finally started playing Online Chess on chess.com, after only playing Live Chess (blitz games) for the first several months.  There's a reason I didn't try it for so long.  I've played the game Lines of Action (give it a try if you haven't played it) on Little Golem (littlegolem.net) for a few years.  I finally quit a few months ago for two main reasons:  (1) all the context-switching involved in playing multiple "correspondence" games made me lose my train of thought and it was just taking too much time, and (2) cheating became rampant at the top levels of competition, and the site owner did nothing about it.  I don't mean suspected cheating -- I mean obvious cheating, where a player owns several accounts and plays them against each other, resigning after 1 or 2 moves, in addition to probable computer assistance.

So I basically quit playing on Little Golem and that's what brought me to chess.com a few months ago.  I decided to finally try Online Chess and have been happy with it so far (it probably helps that I haven't lost a game yet, although I am surely losing in at least 1 or 2 that I'm playing now).  Since I'm not at the top levels of competition in chess, I don't have to worry as much about cheating, and it's encouraging to see that chess.com takes cheating seriously and bans cheaters.  As for the constant context-switching, having the Notes, Analysis Board, and conditional moves are all things that help alleviate that.

So far so good.  We'll see if I find it sucking away too much of my time.

For now I will leave you with a puzzle taken from one of my Online Chess games.  Enjoy.