My Suggestion

Two things would be absolutely great for this site:

First, where's the live chat people? Seriously! 'Nuff said!

Second, I like how we can choose to begin games with a freaking huge database of established openings and variants. But could we just do a simple option of creating a game with turn and move odds as handicaps? It'd be fun and helpful to be able to create games against beginners where I can start the game down a Queen and a few moves.

Thanks for listening :)

There is live chat in live chess right?

BarneyRubble

You're right. But honestly, that's not the same as having a live chat window available to you 24/7. Plus, it's a lot harder to coordinate when to meet via Live Chess without actual chat features.

Would it be that hard to create a feature that allowed customizable unrated games that offer piece and/or move odds?

not being "in" on the site design, I would guess that the chat would be not too hard, and the piece/move odds a pandoras box they don't want to open. But don't take my word for it I'm no web developer.

I do like the idea of piece odds chess. I read here a while ago that the staff were focusing on just getting normal chess right, then they will look at introducing variants (I think piece odds would kinda fall into this category even though it's perhaps technically not a variant)  I'm sure they'll get to it eventually :-)

Hmm, reminds of of game of Go (see www.usgo.org for additional info), where they use handicap stones of up to 9 stones for the weaker player depending on the rating of the stronger player (9 dan to 30 kyu), but in chess a few less pieces for the stronger player! The goal of playing "go" is to surround more territory than your opponent, there is only black and white stones and you can capture stones, but that a small part of the game!

In Go they do it to make the game more interesting for the "weaker player" as well as making "more challenging" for the stronger player, plus normally the weaker player gets to play Black as black makes the first move in Go. The normal size board has 361 intersections or 256 squares, which equals to 4 chessboards and they use 181 black stones and 180 white stone if they are using the AGA rules!

Hmm, its not a new game its approx. 4500 years old while chess is little over 1500 years old. Names vary by country in China its called wéiqí, In Japan - igo in Korea baduk, in USA - Western world - go! For additional info see Wikipedia - Go and to be fair there a nice article there as well on Chess and its history. I play both games although chess much longer then Go!

So the idea of a handicap given to a weaker player on a board game is not new and if chess.com can do this for students of Chess it would be great! Maybe not as a rated game but a variant of chess, such as chess960, etc. By the way I play turn-base go at Dragon Go Server as "frank713" as well" should you be interesting in playing go!

Give me piece odds or give me death!

Then I must insist you play Go with us at "Dragon Go Server" and we'll give you up to "Nine stones" as a beginner with no rating! After that well it hopefully will require less stones to equalize the game!

In Chess here that may take some time due to programming and chess rules playing was not design to give handicaps. Hmm unless you like to try me at blindfold chess, me with blindfold not seeing the board and you seeing the board, unrated of course!

See You at Dragon Go Sever someday soon, as you hmm will need at least a few handicap stones to play me well!

Sounds like challenge to me! Hmm then as 21kyu at DGS that may not be need, OTB I'm 10 kyu.

Mahalo!

You can implement something approximating to pieces odds by giving a piece away. Other handicaps have also been proposed ... http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/handicapping-systems---levelling-the-playing-field

Aloha True, but for a rated game chess allows no handicaps, for fun and practice no problem! Go on the hand is played with handicaps when needed as well as no handicap tournaments all for rated games. Mahalo for information!