Joshua B. Lilly wrote:

"FICS is the best non-pay place for chess."



Richard B. Becker wrote:

"I never understand when people bad mouth FICS like this."





Ooooooooooookay.
What I never understand is when people respond to something you said, but
act like you said the exact opposite. Absolutely nonsensical. In my
message, I recommended FICS and said not one bad word about it, yet I'm "bad
mouth"ing it? How do you figure? Logic is your friend.



"Joshua B. Lilly" wrote:

You know what? The best you`re going to find is probably ICC or the
Chessbase server. Yes, you have to spend money to play on either of
those,
but that`s exactly why it`s so good: most people willing to pay are more
serious about it. You can, on either of these, save your games in a PGN
file already on your hard drive, if you so desire. On ICC, so far as I
know, some games are even stored on the server itself also, and anyone can
look them up and play over them. FICS is the best non-pay place for
chess.
Yahoo! is perhaps the absolute worst place (it allows for cheating and
does
not recognise things like Draw by Third Occurance of Position or Draw by
Insufficient Mating Material).
If you don`t want to pay, check FICS. You get lots of computer
cheaters, punks, and assorted cheaters and losers on Yahoo! and other
places
like that, in addition to their software not incorporating all the rules
of
modern tournament chess.

I never understand when people bad mouth FICS like this. I
constantly see people saying how ICC is the best site around,
but I've never heard anyone describe a single feature of ICC
that FICS doesn't have. The only significant differences that
I'm aware of are that ICC costs money, and ICC generally has
more masters and grandmasters logged on than any other site.
So if you want to watch their games, head there. Otherwise,
FICS is just as good as ICC in every respect.

As far as people cheating, I've heard just as many complaints
about that from people on the pay sites as on FICS. Yahoo seems
to be the worst site around for junk like that, just because it's
the first place many players discover when they start to play on
the internet. Luckily, the more serious players tend to leave to
play elsewhere, but the cheaters usually aren't concerned with
finding a better place to play, so they stay there. But
unfortunately, such things exist at all sites, at least in small
quantities.

And as someone else mentioned, it sounds like you haven't played
on Yahoo in a while. When I first started playing chess more than
two years ago, I played on Yahoo regularly, and it did recognize
the draws that you're saying it can't handle.

So for the original poster, I'd say head to FICS (freechess.org),
and give it a try. I think you'll be happy there, without having
to pay for a service like ICC that's nearly identical.

--Richard