Mark Weeks has finished his fifth and final article comparing and
contrasting online play sites:
http://chess.about.com/library/weekly/aa04a24.htm
I found his assessment fairly balanced, although the services were often
judged on the basis of the java clients - eg FICS was judged overly harshly
on the basis of JavaBoard, whereas if Weeks had downloaded and tried a
graphical interface perhaps he would be more positive about FICS.

The index of all five articles can be found he
http://chess.about.com/library/ble29wto.htm

Interestingly he gives the highest rating to http://www.chess21.com - the
World Chess21 Network. I'm not familiar with it personally, but Weeks give
it very high marks. How does it compare to ICC, FICS or USCL?
--
Gregory Topov
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"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan

"Gregory Topov" wrote in message ...
Interestingly he gives the highest rating to http://www.chess21.com - the
World Chess21 Network. I'm not familiar with it personally, but Weeks give
it very high marks. How does it compare to ICC, FICS or USCL?

Review of chess21.com (copied & pasted)

I tried chess21.com and quite liked it. chess21.com's java interface
reminds me a lot of KC Player (the interface from the now extinct
kasparovchess.com).

The server apparently is in Spain, and so there are a lot of Spanish
speaking players as a result (including some of the admin staff).
English speaking players are in a minority, so don't expect
conversations with your opponents if you don't speak Spanish!

Membership is free, although with payment you become a VIP member, and
can watch GMs play (appears to be a few). VIP members can also use
chess21.com's downloadable graphic interface instead of the java one.
But the java one is fairly impressive, and seems to work just fine.
The free account also allows you to play an unlimited number of rated
games, so most people who are happy using the java interface will find
VIP membership unnecessary.

One neat feature of the java interface is that it includes a pleasant
seek graph, with a colour code for the different rating categories.
In this respect it is certainly a superior chess server to places like
Yahoo and MSN.

The free account doesn't allow you to save PGN files automatically,
although the java viewer does enable you to view the PGN at the end of
game, so you can copy the text and paste it into a PGN file. The PGN
however is in long algebraic form e.g. e2-e4, and it did not always
seem to paste into a plain text PGN file correctly. Over a period of
time, this is likely to become annoying to someone who wants to keep a
record of their games in PGN.

The most common time controls appear to be lightning and blitz, so if
you're looking for anything slower than rapid time controls (20 0) you
may have a harder time finding an opponent.

In summary, the only real minuses I've noticed:
- there are no separate ratings for lightning/blitz/standard
- the ratings appear inflated, and don't bear any resemblance to real
ratings. (Initial rating is 1800, and most ratings are about 350-400
points above actual ones). The rankings of ratings into the
categories of Beginner, Club, Advanced, Expert, Master and GM,
however, is helpful.
- chat and help is 95% in Spanish
- saving games in PGN format has some glitches
- few games with time controls more than 20 0

Certainly being a paid VIP member means getting extra benefits, but if
you're going to shell out money, ICC is probably a more sensible and
popular choice.

But if you're looking for a place to play for free, chess21.com is
certainly a very good option to consider. More serious players will
probably find it inferior to freechess.org (FICS) and the variety of
free interfaces available for FICS. But for the casual player looking
for a place to play with ease of use, chess21.com is certainly
superior to playing chess at Yahoo and MSN. But despite its
positives, chess21.com doesn't deserve to get the same high-star
rating as freechess.org as far as free chess servers go.