Internet Chess Club
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Type of site
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Chess server |
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| Available in | English, Catalan, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish |
| Owner | Internet Chess Club, Inc. |
| Website | http://www.chessclub.com/ |
| Alexa rank |
 97,810 (April 2014[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Users | over 30,000 |
| Launched | 1 March 1995 |
| Current status | Open |
The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is a commercial Internet chess server devoted to the play and discussion of chess and chess variants. ICC currently has over 30,000 subscribing members. It was the first Internet chess server and is the first and largest pay to play chess server.
The first Internet chess server (ICS), programmed by Michael Moore and Richard Nash, was launched on 15 January 1992. Players logged in by telnet, and the board was displayed as ASCII text. Bugs in the server software allowed illegal moves, false checkmates etc. Over time more and more features were added to ICS, such as Elo ratings and a choice of graphical interfaces. The playing pool grew steadily, many of the server bugs were fixed, and players began to have higher expectations for stability.
In 1992, Daniel Sleator (darooha) volunteered to take over as head programmer, and began a large overhaul of the server code. He addressed, among other issues, the frequent complaint that players would lose blitz games on time due to Internet lag. In 1994, he copyrighted the code, and began receiving purchase offers from companies wanting to commercialize the server. On 1 March 1995, Sleator announced his intentions to commercialize ICS, renaming it the Internet Chess Club, or ICC, and charging a yearly membership fee. The membership is free for players with a Grandmaster or International Master title.
Some programmers who had worked on the original ICS became unhappy with what they saw as the commoditization of their project. Led by Chris Petroff, they formed the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), which to this day continues to allow everyone to access all features for free.
On 29 May 2007, the World Chess Network was bought by the Internet Chess Club. It was then merged with Chess Live, another Internet chess server acquired by Internet Chess Club from GamesParlor. The result of the acquisition and merger was the formation of World Chess Live, a new Internet chess server that merged features of both services. World Chess Live merged into, and become part of, the Internet Chess Club on 19 March 2012. For some years, the Spanish on-line chess portal JaqueMate.org had technological support provided by ICC. The portal closed on 30 April 2013 with members transferred to ICC.
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