FICS is free, popular and works well.

http://www.freechess.org/

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Regards,

Peter

I more of a chess player than a Go player, so I've played a lot of chess online.

As mentioned, FICS is free, and not a bad place to play casual games. If you are looking for a free site to play live games, it is probably the best one out there.

The best commercial (i.e., you have to pay) chess server on the Internet is probably ICC (the Internet Chess Club). It's not free, and its mostly for fairly serious players. But it has the best interface, the most players, the strongest players, lots of great features, etc. I think they offer a free trial of some kind.

Playchess.com is another commerical chess server associated with ChessBase (a big distributor of chess software), and I've used it in the past but found it inferior to ICC in virtually every respect (worse interface, a gazillion computer cheaters, less players, less strong players, etc.).

I use playchess.com (though I'm a big fan of Chessbase software, so I like the convenience of having online play and offline analysis all in one program) and have been very happy with it. I guess I've never really considered if there are cheaters or not; I suppose if someone cheats in an endgame situation and beats me I don't really care because it'll give me the opportunity to study where my skills are weaker, ya know?

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I came to go through Kawabata and was introduced to a whole new world.

I play a lot on chess.com (They have an app for the ipad which is pretty handy, and makes blitzing pretty fun)

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Tactics yes, Tact no...