Hello, there. I'm Eric, a brand new addition to the Microsoft.com Operations Tools Team. As a part of beaming into the team, I thought I would try the team weblog. For the subject of my first post, I will keep it relatively light: playing chess. I have been enjoying playing occasional friendly games of chess for many years, and enjoy it in many forms. I am no Grandmaster, but I have some basic battle skills, as some of my new teammates are finding out firsthand.  >:]

It is great to play at home on my nice big wooden board with the solid, heavy, wooden pieces which yield a satisfying thud when you place them, adding emphasis to your decisions. But I rarely get to play on that board at home.

More convenient, is playing chess on the Web. I have played games at Yahoo and MSN. These sites are cool -- clocks, rated games, play people in real-time all around the world, chat with them during the game, 24x7. Another novel way to play is via MSN Instant Messenger. You can challenge your IM contacts to chess, checkers, tic tac toe and more.

However, all of these forms of chess involve waiting -- waiting for your opponent to move -- which can be a drag. When using a clock, your wait is your gain. Without a clock, once you have your next move figured out, based on the move you just know they will do, you are left to: trash talk, small talk, day dream, think about work. Not the optimum use of your time  :)

Which brings me to a more time-efficient way to go: correspondence chess. This style of chess has been practiced for eons. A primitive form is sending notations describing moves via snail mail, while you keep a board at home/work set up with the current state of the game. The beauty of correspondence chess is you can take all the time you need, while your opponent pursues other interests -- no waiting. The downside is that paper mail involves postage, envelopes, and thinking about postal pickup times.

Fortunately, computing has improved correspondence chess. I played the first form of electronic correspondence chess a few years ago, using email and custom Exchange chess forms, built with Visual Basic. Moves would arrive via email. You opened the email, and the board would render. Make a move, send it back. Take all the time you want. What fun! And you could replay entire current games, and past games, stepping through each move, one by one. The bad news is that this custom Exchange form seems to be extinct now, when running newer versions of Exchange and Outlook.

So, the other day, I wondered if somebody had yet created webpage-based correspondence chess. The answer is yes, and there are many choices! You make moves on a webpage, click a button, and then your opponent gets an email notification with a link back to the game board. You install nothing. Perfect!

Some require a substantial registration. I have tried two that don't require registration:  eChess.org, PostcardChess.com. But my favorite so far is SchemingMind.com. It requires a modest registration, but it is worth it. Unlike those other two, SchemingMind shows the game history, offers replaying of each move, stores your past games for later review, and might enforce more rules. eChess.org states clearly that rule enforcement is up to the players.

I understand that there is another way to play where you install a client desktop application and configure it to connect to some chess server. But this has always seemed like too much trouble to me.

There you have it, enough information to get you started burning all of your free time playing chess -- I mean keeping your mental faculties extra sharp via logical chess problem solving.

Bring it on,
- Eric