Can you imagine the feeling to play chess with Garry Kasparov? I think it would be difficult to imagine such a thing until it finally happens, but the problem is that the chances for you to play with him are almost equal to zero unless you are some of his closest friends or a chess prodigy with the idea to meet him in a tournament. Of course, if he returns to professional chess. The chances for you to meet one of the conditions above are also too small and probably you are not rich enough just to pay him for a game of chess and the dream to play chess with Garry Kasparov will remain just a fantasy.

This used to be true 15 years ago, but today in the time when everybody plays chess online it is absolutely possible to play with Kasparov in some of the sites for chess online. This is possible not only for the greatest chess player of all times, but almost for any elite chess master in the world.

There is even a story about a young Bulgarian chess player who got lucky to play chess online with Kasparov and even to beat him in a blitz game. Having in mind the well known resentment of Kasparov at blitz chess the story about him and the Bulgarian amateur who beat him in a chess online game is not much plausible.

However, what is more important is that today everybody can play online chess and sooner or later he or she can play with some of the best players in the world.

It happened to me. Some years ago I suddenly started a game with a female champion of Georgia and I even won. The feeling was great. I shared the story with my friends. I wanted to play more and more chess and this was only because I could play with such a strong player. But leave the chess elite players alone.

The ability to play online chess with everybody is what is important here, not just the elite masters. A few years ago you could play only with your friends and may be with some players in your chess club. Today you just plug in your computer and you can choose among millions of players.

This is the beauty of playing online chess.

Strategic thinking isn’t something that can be learned from a guide. While you might learn strategies, the ability to formulate and adapt your own strategies is something that takes time and practice to master:

Start analysing your games and accepting feedback

In order to improve your strategy you first need to find out where it is that you’re falling short. To do this you’re going to have to gulp down a big slice of humble pie and start analysing your games. Record your games and analyse them either by yourself or have someone else analyse your games with you. Bringing in a more experienced player or an opponent to analyse your games is a great way to gain insight into the way they strategize and utilise their tactics. Everyone has their own ideas of what they might have done differently and it’s good to get that alternative perspective to understand what you can do to improve. Also, it’s important that you don’t take criticism personally and learn to take responsibility for your mistakes. The only way to improve your strategies is to at first come to terms with the fact that your strategies need improvement or else your progress will stagnate.

Slow down

Patience is one of the most important tools for mastering chess when you start learning and even after gaining experience it’s an important tool for exercising strategic thinking. Being overly confident or impatient with a game is the fastest route to losing. Take the time to play a game with no time constraints and in between turns take your time to fully study the board. Look at all of your options and all of your opponent’s options. Put aside what you’ve learned about openings, variations and tactics for a while and just focus on how you can improve your position on the board. Improving your strategic thinking requires you to exercise a deeper knowledge of chess rather than exercising what you memorised from guides.

Get to know the basic principles

If you want to really practice your strategic thinking then you need to start from scratch and analyse the foundations of your strategy. The first step to this is analysing the strengths and weaknesses of each chess piece beyond what you know it can and can’t do. In what ways does each piece have an advantage and disadvantage over the others? Which pieces are able to support each other and which pieces hinder each other? This kind of knowledge will lead you to easily adapt your strategies and will give you small advantages that will, overall, improve your chances of winning.

Practice whenever possible

As with any skill, practice is an absolute necessity if you want to improve. Take the time to practice chess often and analyse your games as well as other people’s games. Outside of playing chess it’s also important that you don’t let your strategic thinking degrade due to lack of practice. Exercise it in other ways by practicing problem solving and critical thinking, such as when taking part in an Escape Room in Glasgow or tactical puzzles based on pattern recognition. But, understand that reading books and guides for hours a day is not going to do nearly as much good as simply playing a few a games of chess each day.

When it comes to gaming platforms, they are growing and growing in recent years, due to the evolution of technology that has been appearing. Mobile gaming has become increasingly popular, as have online casinos, and now new gaming platforms have been appearing to help casinos become more mobile as the years go on. We’ve put together a list of the new gaming platforms that are helping casinos to become mobile

Smartphone Optimisation

Smartphones have boomed in recent years, with more and more models and makes being commercially used all over the world. These smartphones have led the revolution to people wanting to play more games on the move, rather than remaining static at home. With people being able to play on the move, there are far more opportunities for gambling to become mobile, as a wider demographic of people are being introduced to online gaming. Smartphones have become a huge gaming platform, and with many casinos having moved online anyway, all they had to do was optimise their websites suited to mobile gaming. On top of this, apps have also been created as a part of the smartphone boom, which led to people being able to access casinos and other games quicker and easier than ever before. Anywhere in the world that there is internet access, people can gain access to their accounts and begin to deposit and spend money on either the app or their phone’s internet browser.

easyPlay Mobile Tournaments

News was released recently that MGM announced a new gaming platform, which will lead to casinos and gambling becoming even more mobile orientated. This platform allows players to take part in tournaments across 9 of MGM’s casinos as the Wi-Fi connects it around;. Simply they can play wherever and whenever they want to, rather than heading to a bricks and mortar casino. easyPlay is the next step of interconnected mobile gaming, and the fact that it involves just tournaments makes the site more original and niche, attracting more and more people to the site.

Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality

Augmented reality and virtual reality are some of the most interesting and highly sought after forms of gaming. With the hype around augmented Pokemon Go has led to a revolution in the gaming industry, and this could quickly make way for other types of games to move towards this new form of gaming. Gambling is one of the biggest industries when it comes to online gaming platforms, and the likes of the Apple Watch and Android Wear will also continue to change mobile gaming very quickly. With new technologies that are continuing to appeal to the gaming market, consoles and computer games, although they will continue to remain popular, will begin to be potentially outdone by mobile gaming, as people are wanting to move away from playing games within their homes. Because of this, there’s a lot of argument about the future of mobile gaming and consoles. Augmented reality and virtual reality are looking to be the future of gaming at home, and it is almost certain that there will be some form of adaptation heading to move casinos further to mobile.

Here on chessonline.eu we really like to give you some of the best sites for playing chess online for free. It is great to have this opportunity to meet some of the strongest players on the net and this service to be free of charge.

This is why, now with great pleasure I am writing this review for one of the oldest and best sites for playing chess online - freechess.org - a direct path to a free internet chess server.

If you like playing chess online you would know what FICS is about. For those of you, I suppose not many, who have no idea what we are talking about I will simply tell you this number – 300 000. This is the number of registered players on this site.

By joining in this community you will be able to find opponents among not fewer than 300 000 enthusiastic chess players. Is there any better place to play chess? As far as I know, there isn’t.

So, what will freechess.org give you? On this site you will be able to play chess online against other people or if you like against strong chess engines. You can play slow chess games like the professionals usually do or you can play blitz games as most of the people on the net.

Besides just playing chess online, you can improve your game by using “improve your game” services on freechess.org. The greatest one is that you can ask for a grandmaster’s reviewing some of your games. This is the easiest way to improve you game rapidly. The mistakes you made and the good moves will be pointed out with clear explanation from some of the best chess players in the world. What more can a real chess player and a fan ask for?

You can also ask for reviews of games from other players which you find interesting or unclear. The grandmaster will show you the game from inside.

Besides just playing games freechess.org is also a great place to watch chess online. Many major tournaments are covered on the site with some grandmasters as live commentators. They will do their best to reveal the secret of the best chess games.

Freechess.org have thought about ordinary chess players too. On this site you can play in many free tournaments which are scheduled twice or three times every week. These tournaments are also part of freechess.org’s year’s ranking.

So, with an opportunity to play online with 300 000 chess players, watch many major tournaments and visit a real place to improve your chess online, freechess.org is one of the best places to play chess on the internet. It is guaranteed.

Here on chessonline.eu I would like to introduce you another good chess online site where you can play and learn chess and also you can find many friends from the chess world. This site is chessplanet.ru and of course it is in Russian.

However, this is not a problem at all because everything related to chess on this site is really cool. So, to the main point. What does this site offer for playing chess online?

First of all, it gives us a window to a whole new chess world. We all know that the Russians are probably the most chess-oriented nation on Earth. With chessplanet.ru you can play with more than 3000 players every single second. Playing chess online on this site simply requires downloading their platform and installing it on your computer.

One more thing. On this site playing chess online is a paid service, but the prices are really reasonable. It is 400 roubles per year, which is nothing, considering the service you are going to get.

Besides the opportunity you have on chessplanet.ru to play chess online with so many players all the time, you can have fun with many more chess options.

For example, on this chess site you will find one of the greatest collections of chess puzzles. You can try to solve a random one or a puzzle which is determined from your chess puzzle’s rating.

Another great feature on this chess server is the opportunity to learn chess online from many grand masters. Most of the chess courses are paid, but some of them are completely free which gives a great chance to learn from the best. These courses cover every single part of a chess game – from opening and middle game to endgames. Everything is arranged so that the player can gain the maximum from these courses.

So, with few words – chessplanet.ru is a great site to play chess online. A place where you can learn from the best and most important – a site where you will find many chess loving friends.

When you make a good game of chess it is a pleasure to share with the opposite partner the analyses, thoughts and plans you had during the game. Thus both of you will improve your skills and become better chess players. This can be easily achieved while playing real-time chess against a real partner on a real board. What happens when you play chess online?

In fact, despite the great number of advantages that online chess offers, not being able to share your analyses after the game is one of the few disadvantages of playing the game on your computer.

However, this is no longer true. Just recently Chessbase – perhaps the biggest platform for playing online chess, released a new version of their chess online program which allows free sharing of analyses – not only the ones made by the programs themselves but also analyses made by the programs of your opponents.

This will definitely lead to the better understanding of chess by us all who love playing chess online and sharing our thoughts and arguments after the game.

The system for online video distribution – YouTube gives an opportunity for a quite good training in chess online. For one reason or another a lot of chess masters, including some of the best grand masters, often release video tutorials for chess, where they examine different aspects of the game.

You can easily find these online chess tutorials in YouTube where you just type chess, chess online or even chess lessons. You will be quite amazed at the number of video lessons there.

Frankly speaking, the wealth of analyses of chess games, lessons and explanations found in YouTube is more than a person can browse, read and realize.

Of course, in the beginning you may find some difficulties with making sense of so much information about chess online but I’m certain you will get used it sooner or later.

The existence of such an abundance of information about chess in YouTube and the easy online access to it once again prove what an amazing resource is the internet for chess and the opportunities for playing the game and analyzing it on the internet.

Here are some chess online videos.

Do you want to participate in chess online tournaments every day? If the answers is yes, then check what chessbase, the biggest portal for chess online has to offer. There are daily chess online tournaments with different controls.

Everyone can join a tournament of a control 5+3 minutes, or super blitz tournaments for online chess which offer 3 minutes for ending a game. There are even faster chess competitions with a control of 1 minute for ending the whole game.

Every day these chess online tournaments draw hundred of chess players in chessbase and they are usually played according to the Swiss system in 9 or 12 rounds.

If the control for ending a chess game is 5+3 then the whole online chess tournament will take you about 2 and a half hours. For the faster versions of the game it would take you only an hour.

The problem of playing chess online in chessbase is that all such tournaments are paid and you will have to pay a certain monthly fee in order to take the most of the opportunities for playing chess in the internet offered by chessbase.

Chessbase is probably the biggest platform for chess online and the place which is much bigger than a common platform for chess online. In chessbase you can find at any time more than 2000 chess players with whom you can play a game of chess online. The games that are usually played online are the blitz games of five minutes and some of the most popular are the fast games of 1 minute for every participant to end the game.

There are even better options for chess online in which in order to end a game the chess player has no time, even a second, and the only thing he can count on is the increase added for each of his moves. It sounds fast, right? A chess online game with a time control 0+3, for example, is really extreme.

In chessbase, every day you can take part in a number of chess tournaments where according to the Swiss system hundreds of chess players at different levels can participate.

What makes chessbase really worth using, apart from the fact that it is a chess community where thousands of chess players play every day, is the live broadcasts of big and not so chess tournaments. Quite often the games of the greatest players are broadcast online accompanied with a commentary by a famous grandmaster, which makes the whole thing even more interesting.

The only problem of chessbase, if it could be considered a problem, is the fact that almost all of the functions of the website are paid, which limits the number of people who sometimes just don’t want to pay in order to play chess online.

If you enjoy playing chess online then you will be definitely interested in this great opportunity offered by a lot of websites for correspondence chess online. How about playing correspondence chess with some of the greatest grand masters nowadays? It sounds fantastic, right?

How is this possible? As a whole it’s fairly easy. You just need to register in such a website for correspondence chess and then play a few chess online games in order to build up your rating. When you are ready just check who of the elite grand masters is invited to participate in a demonstration game and sign in.

The way the moves are made in the beginning may seem a bit strange but this is an online game where millions of chess players participate and there hasn’t been a better system developed yet. So here is how the moves are made.

It’s quite simple. Every participant in the game suggests a move. The move with the most suggestions from the participants is made on the virtual board. The grand master ponders over the situation and makes his move and so on and so forth until there is a winner.

Of course, quite often in these chess online battles the grand masters are the ones who win but this shouldn’t discourage us, right?