Chess

I would very much like to learn to play chess. Can anyone recommend a good comprehensive program?

Also, a friend of mine once had a small electronic chess board. Do they still make these? Does anyone know where I can get one?

ETA: Answered the last two questions with Google. Thanks.

Still need input on the program.

reply to post by rtyfx


Try www.chess.com

As for chess programs, there are several options:

- Buy a complete commercial game.
Rybka is propably the best and strongest chess engine out there. You can buy it with the Fritz 12 GUI and get a really great program. Click here

You can also buy one of the Fritz games. Fritz 13 and DeepFritz 12 ("Deep" versions are meant for multicore CPUs, they take advantage of the multiple CPUs to not only reduce wait time but also to give more power to the artificial intelligence) are the newest version. They are really good and have tutorials, helps, manuals for people who aren't russian chess experts

A good alternative for beginners (though it's more meant for kids, but i guess any beginner can learn from it) is "Learn to Play Chess with Fritz & Chesster: Chess Complete 3-Pack" it contains all 3 Fritz & Chesster games and it's not expensive.
The Fritz games can be easily purchased at Amazon or any other shop that sells games.

- A Freeware solution. NagaSkaki is supposed to be really good. But i haven't tried it.

- Third thing would be a combination of a pure chess engine with a graphical board. Some of the engines are freeware. Houdini is one of the best, Version 2 is commercial, while 1.5 is freeware.

Another good one is Alaric
As said, you need a graphical board to play. Try XBoard/Winboard

I hope that helps

Wow, thanks for the input! I really appreciate the time taken to answer my questions.

Arasan is a very smart, fast, FREE chess program you can download. It's the one I always use when I want to play chess against my computer.

i have chess titans on my pc.
its quite good to learn how to play, when someone IRL asks me to teach them how to play chess i tell them to play chess titans on their pc. play against the computer on easy just to learn the basics.

reply to post by rtyfx


Virtual chess? HAHA

try SparkChess.com mate. good luck.