I thought it was about time I wrote about RedHotPawn - probably the one website I make a point of visiting every day. Perhaps obviously, it’s a Chess website, and lets people play a form of the game known as “correspondence chess”. The idea is that you organise a game, and you go in and make a move when you get the chance - the website keeps track of your game for you, and even emails you when it’s your turn if you want.
Making moves is idiot proof too - the picture to the right shows a typical view you get of the chess board on the website - and you move the pieces around just by clicking on them. You can even pull up an “analysis board” if you want - which lets you move pieces around to help you think without actually making the moves. I guess it’s kind of “thinking out loud”.
As you can see in the picture, the last move your opponent made (in this case one of my friends at work) is hilighted - but you can also flick through the moves that have been made so far, and record notes to yourself too. They really have thought of everything.
It doesn’t stop there though - when you organise games with people, you can choose to play “rated” games - which affect your “rating” among everybody. Chess has a fantastic rating system that you will recognise if you have ever played X-Box live - it’s called “ELO”, after a guy called “Arpad Elo” that invented it. Behind the scenes it’s based on a hideous formula, but the general idea is that if you beat somebody your rating goes up - and the higher their rating is than yours, the more your rating goes up.
In the picture above you can see my rating since I first joined RedHotPawn a couple of years ago. You will notice it steadily climbed and then levelled out for a long time - wobbling around according to how much effort I was putting in to playing chess. Then it took a huge dive - this was mainly down to me entering a couple of tournaments on the site, and not really thinking about if I would have time to play in them or not - eventually all my opponents claimed wins in the games (which you can do if your opponent doesn’t move for a few weeks). I now find myself climbing back up the hill again - as you can see the beginnings of at the far right of the graph.
There are some really interesting things that correspondence chess throws up - like Tournaments. If you join a tournament at RedHotPawn, all of your games kick off at the same time as each other - you play all your games at once. That sounds scary, but it really isn’t - because you can make your moves whenever you want. You might make obvious moves in some games immediately - and leave the complicated ones until another day when you have more time to think (or if you’re really obsessed, print them out and walk around with them in your pocket).
I could go on and on about how good RedHotPawn is, and bore you to death. Instead of doing that, why not visit the site - www.redhotpawn.com - join (which is free!) and request a game against me (I’m “jonbeckett73”).