A good Internet site to play chess online?
 

What's said.

I've never played there, but chess.com is probably a good place to start.

I'll try it. Thanks.

Good luck.

I was doing chess puzzles late last year (I'm very rusty), but I really need a place to keep a board set up permanently. I got tired of setting it up and taking it down.

What is a chess puzzle?

You are presented with a diagram of a chess board showing the placement of the pieces for your starting point. Depending on the puzzle, you are challenged to achieve mate in two or three (sometimes more) moves. The puzzles are often based on classic championship games.

Here's chess puzzle website that looks fairly reasonable.

Me, when I decided I wanted to re-take up chess, I bought a couple of books on simple chess puzzles. You can also find a number of books on chess at Project Gutenberg; this is an excellent one: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5614

When I was a teen, I was quite devoted to chess, but then I discovered contract bridge. Now the chances I will ever again find a foursome for bridge, especially in these viral times, seem slim.

Thanks to you, I think I shall take out my chess set again!

If you want to play, we can play by PM. You'll probably trounce me, but I'm willing to give it a go.

And how could be play by PM? I'm curious. I have just discovered a web site, https://lichess.org, by which you can play online with a friend. They give me an URL. I send to you this URL and you paste it in your internet address bar. And we are instantly playing a game. No registration needed and completely free. The only thing is that I haven't learned yet how to use it. It seems a little difficult but perhaps you could teach me how to use it.

There are sets of notations for movements on chess boards. That's how movements are recorded. You use the notations to communicate your moves. To use the method that I'm most familiar with, P-K4 means (king's) pawn moves to spot K4, that is, move the pawn in front of the king from space two (where it sits at the opening of the game) to space 4 in front of your king, that is, two squares forward.

Apparently, the "algebraic" notation is all the rage now (it's explained at the link). I don't know it as well, but I can learn it.

A long time ago, when I was a young 'un, I played a game by mail. I would mail a letter with my move to my opponent, then she would mail me a letter with her move. The game took months, but it was fun.

And that is how we could play chess by PM? Just mail chess?

We agree on who's white and who's black, then white PMs the first move, black responds, and so it goes. Kind of like mail, but with added electrons.:)

Take a look at the book from Project Gutenberg. I think it will answer a lot of your questions about chess notation etc.

It's unfortunate, but I don't have a chess board. I do have a very good program, chess.exe, but it only runs on ms-dos. Perhaps slackware has something one could use as a chess board? It's difficult to find a chess program that allows playing between two humans on the same machine.

I understand. Maybe when you get hold of a chess set we can give this a try.

In the meantime, I'm still going to open up my chess set and start doing some puzzles because of this conversation with you. Thank you.

Here's an article about chess games for Linux: https://www.linuxlinks.com/chess/

Thanks to you, frankbell. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. Now I'll go to bed and tomorrow I'll read your article. I'm looking forward to play a game with you.

It's difficult to find a chess program that lets two humans to play a chess game on the same machine. However I know Linux has to have a chess program allowing that. I've have googled with the string "linux chess human vs human same computer" but have not been lucky. Where can I find such a program?

 

I searched +"linux" chess two player and found an old thread here which recommends PyChess.

(You may have got confused if you visited the old PyChess site which directs people to pychess.org - an online version powered by the PyChess software - the above link is the updated website for the desktop version.)