One crappy feature of Chess.com

I started playing internet chess over 20 years ago. At that time, FICS and ICC were the big places for serious players, with places like YAHOO's game site merely places for creating ridiculous ratings because of the ill-thought out features.

These days we have many more options, notably ChessBase's PlayChess server, Chess24.com's site, and Chess.com's site. Recently I have found myself playing mostly at Chess.com for a couple of reasons. First, I'm poor, so I can't afford the premium sites like I used to. (Thank you George W. Bush and Barack Obama for creating the worst economy in almost a century.) Secondly, the other free sites have problems of their own. For some reason I just don't do well, visually, with the interface at Chess24 when playing, and these days FICS is a rather depressingly empty place to play. So the look of the interface and the number of players means, as well as the cost, leave me at Chess.com.

There is one HUGE drawback, however. In the early days of internet chess, the big problem was LAG. Lag was what happened when there was a slowdown between your location, the chess server's location, and your opponent's location. It could me you were making insta-moves and still see three minutes disappear off your clock. (The time control of 2 minutes with a 12 second increment wasn't the early favorite on the internet without reason!) This problem was solved with the creation of time stamp/time seal programs, that took note of when one received a move, and let the server know how much time one actually used making the move, thus removing lag as a cause of losing on time. Lag was still annoying to deal with, but at least one didn't lose on time on move two any more.

Well, the problems that were solved on USENET in the way back, are still problems for the web-based servers. Today I've lost two games on time when I made a move, and then watched helplessly as dozens of seconds ticked by before the server told be to commit anatomically impossible acts upon myself - and oh-by-the-way-you-lost-on-time, sucker.

It's bad enough being in slump without having to deal with this nonsense. I guess it's back to FICS and the other two dozen people that haven't left yet. Yay!