or: The adventures and games of Wakkeliwaan at the Intergalactic Chess Café.
(New In Chess, may 1995)
It was a fateful night in february when I first saw that posting on the Internet, in the newsgroup rec.games.chess. It suggested that I try telnet chess.lm.com 5000 and see how I would like it there.
Before I knew what had happened, I had a screenful of names like turbopragma, CarbonNitride, Sartre, DEATH, GrandJaap, Hoho, toto, Barendregt, zigzag, CapedCrusader, Roman, gutterface; all chessplayers I understood - some of them, judging from the ratings next to their names, quite good, and all ready to play chess with me. When I had mastered my first few commands, and was able to read their personal files, I saw they were from all over the world, from the US, Iceland, New Zealand, Brazil, Turkey, Chile, India, even from Leiden, but regrettably few from Eastern Europe. DEATH was a student from Puerto Rico, HUS an IM from Singapore, Belsebub a blitz-only player, TheKiller a mathematician from Sweden, Galileo a father of four from San Diego, Pawngrubber a girl, Candide a Texan who turned out never to have heard of Pangloss and indeed, Roman was Roman Dzindzichashvili. He had already played over 1500 blitz games there, and his rating was over 2800. The global village suddenly seemed like something from the past - this was a global living room; an Intergalactic Chess Café. Officially it was, at that moment, named ICS; the Internet Chess Server - now it's ICC, the Internet Chess Club.
I registered, chose a 'handle' I would play under (something other than
Wakkeliwaan, but I like the anonymity of ICC - only a few players reveal
their identity in their notes) and immediately this text appeared on my
screen:
Challenge: money (2113) Wakkeliwaan (0) unrated standard 4 20
You may accept this with "accept money" decline it with
"decline money" or propose different parameters.
Shivering with expectancy, I typed 'accept money', and my screen filled with hieroglyphs amongst which I could, with some trouble, discern chessmoves, mine and his. We were playing an actual blitz game (Fischer clock; 4 minutes initial time, 20 seconds increment) while being a few thousand miles apart. I typed my moves here, while according to his file he typed his in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Even so, those moves appeared on my screen instantly, bleep onto bleep, as if he were sitting across the table. It was overwhelming, mindboggling - the old dream of omnipresence come true. Our mothers have taught us that when we're here, we're here and not there, but that didn't hold anymore. Soon I was playing a game with somebody in Chile while somebody in Finland peeked over my shoulder and typed on my screen that I was a stupid patzer to sacrifice my knight on b6. (I wasn't! It was good! I only went wrong later!)
I was hooked before I knew what Internet chess could really be. In that
first game with money, I had played the Alekhine - because I had thought
his first move was d2-d4. I had to type my moves then, playing them on
a real chess set - onscreen I only had ASCII-garble and a very crude diagram
with letters where e2-e4 could easily be mistaken for d2-d4. I was sure
there had to be a smoother way, and when I asked the administrators, somebody
typed on my screen: 'get ziics.'
'Getting' ziics, an interface program for Internet
chess, from an 'anonymous ftp site' somewhere far, far away on the Internet,
and getting it to work was an adventure in itself that I am very proud
to have brought off, and when I had it installed, I had a cute little glistening
white-and-green diagram on my screen (my choice from among 10 boards) on
which I only needed to mouseclick my moves, and on which the moves of my
opponents appeared. With that, the chess player's Eldorado was complete.
Over 11000 players have played at least one game on ICC; around 2500
are considered to be active now, meaning they have played a certain number
of games over the last 31 days. Each day some 4000 games are played on
ICC.
There are around 50 GM's, IM's and FM's who play
regularly. Many greats, like Anand, Judit Polgar, Yudashin, Benjamin, have
played at least a few games there and KingLoek - Van Wely of course - rated
2642 with close to 200 games, is one of the world's busiest GM's here,
too.
GMStefansson is GM Stefansson from Iceland, and
pim is Pim Haselager from my club in Amsterdam, but most players have let
their fantasy free reign in choosing their handles. There are many chessnames,
scattered about the ratings spectrum: Alekhine, Smyslov, CapablancaII,
BSpassky, Krapov, GMKirpov, Weenink, Naisortep, Barendregt (who had only
vaguely heard of Barendregt), EUWE, Euwie, Donner, colle, matulovic, lundin
and a whole bunch of Fischers: fischer, bfischer, BobbyFischer, bobbyficher,
Bobbie.
I haven't played Feyenoord (too weak for me), but
I did play MrBill, Hombre, Bereolos, eggbeater, Archangel, crushee, Blokje,
BIGpotz, Oedipus, wokkie, peanut, BLACKisOK, Tijg, SIRPALADIN, Flaneur,
OnePawn, yowsirs, fly, Tiitta, WitPaard, NYKNICK, FatChessGuy, Astrange,
Nemo, mikkot, Hotti, Hoku, DrTheKid, Uzbek, OKIE, salgatov, Trashtalker,
Epor, farendil, Halo, AliBaba, princess, abc, gcfour, Sausage, Fanta, Survivor,
AND, sexman, Zuby, febi, chesspagan and many others.
Had this happened a bit earlier, we might have read
about 'a strong novelty in the VacuumCleaner line of the Lazarus Indian,
first played in DrDeath - SillyOldPawn.'
Internet chess is a marvel. You can play all the games that you want
at any time. You can set any time controls that you can think of. Blitz
from 2 6 to 3 12 is most popular (sometimes some bargaining goes on before
the actual controls are settled) although good old 5 0 is played too. But
with zero increment, there are problems with Internet lag - I'll come to
that. You can watch, move by move, any of the 20 to 50 games that are always
going on. I saw Durex - Donner, femidom - dude, KarlMarx - Nostradamus,
idefix - Luzhin. While they're going on, you can discuss them with the
other players who are watching. You can make remarks to the players themselves.
When the game is finished, you can play it over by yourself, or analyse
it with others. You can have all your games emailed to you automatically.
You can look at, or have emailed, any of a player's last 20 games. You
can have all the the GM- and IM-games played on ICC since august 1994 (some
7000) emailed to you.
Thanks to the computer, you don't need the computer-chess
anymore. It was nice to have this strong player around, but he was
boring. No need to let him out of his bottle again - we have real live
humans onscreen now, who will hang pieces, fall for traps, panick, have
themselves swindled unbelievably. After all those stale computer-games,
it's heaven. Internet chess will be the death of commercial chess computers.
But it is a dangerous marvel. Many players have
played thousands of games on ICC and are logged in almost constantly. In
your own file, shielded from others, is a line that says: '% of life spent
on ICC'. It gives the percentage of time, since you first logged in, that
you have spent in the club. With me, in the beginning, that was 25. I had
to get a second telephone line, just for chess - I had been totally incommunicado.
Eventually, I have managed to get my percentage down to 10. But I'm still
hooked - haven't been so hooked on chess for years. New games, new chances
are never more than a few keystrokes, a few mouseclicks away. It is a feverish
feeling that reminds me of my casino time, that joyful expectancy of buying
your chips, turning into disgust when you have played too long and can't
stop losing, and end up preying: 'God, let me break even' - you're not
going to quit before your rating is back to what it was at the beginning
of your session. Only, it's 2:30 AM, you're bleary-eyed, you don't see
mate in one, and the other guy has just had lunch. And in the end you just
don't care. You start liking to hang pieces, just like those casino
sessions where you started playing tens carefully, and finally threw away
hundreds.
Certain things are different in Internet chess. One guy had a pawn on
the seventh rank against me but never promoted it. After the game I asked
him why, and it turned out he had no interface, had to type his moves,
and didn't know how to type a promotion.
There is the mouse blunder, not unlike Capablanca's
famous move against Thomas when he thought he shoved his rook to a8, but
it halted on a7. Sometimes you click a little carelessly, and some ridiculous
and disastrous move appears on your screen. You can then ask for a takeback,
which will usually be granted, although I suspected some opponents of using
it as a pretext to undo a normal blunder. One night Survivor (Jean Hébert
from Canada, remembered in Holland for his draw in Rio '79 against Timman)
played Qd1-c2 against me in the opening, allowing Bf5xc2. He asked for
a takeback which I gave, but later that night I saw him play Rd1-d7 against
an IM from France. There followed Rd8xd7, just grabbing a rook. Survivor
obviously had wanted to swap rooks with Rd1xd8, and asked for a takeback,
but did not get it. He was fatalistic about it. 'Just won't play him again,'
he said.
'Wash you mouse ball,' I advised him.
Against Akira from Singapore I dropped a piece one
move, and my mouse dropped a queen the next. I resigned. 'Everything all
right?' came a concerned line from across the world. 'Yeah,' I said, 'mouse
dropping.'
The invisibility in the intergalactic chess café is an attractive
feature that can be used in many ways. Are you really playing a girl, a
14-year old, as their notes say? Have I played Martijn Spaan, also from
my club? We know we're both playing on ICC but haven't told each other
our handles, so we simply don't know. Was that guy, who asked for a brief
adjournment because he had to welcome the cleaning lady speaking the truth
or did he want time to analyse our game? Could the real Bobby Fischer be
playing here? The anonymity should appeal to him, and he could create his
ideal playing circumstances.
It is also very easy to take on a disguise. When
I interviewed ICC's boss, Darooha, too many other people were asking him
things, so he just logged out and came back as Quimbee, who could talk
more quietly. Or take this guy Hardin, a historian from San Jose. One night,
after flagging him when he was lost (he agreed to that), we engaged in
a lengthy discussion about time controls and the Will to Win. Chivalrous
players add time to their opponents clocks to compensate for lag, but Hardin
was proud of adding time when he thought the game was too interesting to
be stopped by the clock. I told him, in more polite words, that I have
been too close to real chess to see anything but soft bullshit in that.
Then a few nights later, somebody with the strikingly beautiful name of
tragipawn approached me, asking me, after a few preparatory remarks, if
I had made friends in the café yet, and if I knew a guy named Hardin.
I said I did.
'He was nice,' tragipawn said. 'Didn't flag me when
I was down on time.'
'That's exactly the one thing I don't like about
him,' I typed, 'not wanting to win or lose on time.'
'Why, it's nice of him,' tragipawn persisted.
'No, its soft.'
'You don't like him then... me?'
I had been had hook line and sinker: tragipawn was
Hardin, just sounding me out. Later in our conversation she (she felt like
a she) denied being Hardin, but I have never been able to find tragipawn
again on ICC - when I try to reach her I get the message: 'Does not match
any players name.'
That same night I was greeted by Xmen, who quickly
revealed he was really money, the guy I had played my first game with,
and later by somebody named someone, which made ICC's syntax rather
confusing.
'someone tells you Hi'
'Hi, who are you.'
'someone tells you someone.'
'Of course you're someone. Tell me who.'
'someone tells you Why, someone.'
'Yes, but who, for chrissake.'
'someone tells you Don't get mad - I told you: someone.'
Someone turned out to be someone I already knew
under the name of Uzbek, from Texas. 'Two players from Uzbekistan are among
the world's best 100' he said in his notes, 'and I'm not one of them.'
But he was a strong player; one night I had seen a rating of over
2800 next to his name, which was remarkable even if he had only played
a few games; provisional ratings can be way off. He was playing one Russky,
and it seemed appropriate to send him a note during play: 'Cmon Uzbek,
kill the Russky.' He did, came back to me afterwards to say 'I mated him
accidentally', and since then we are friends. He didn't want to reveal
his true name, but said he was really from Uzbekistan and had played Kasparov
and many other players who are now 2600+ in Soviet youth Olympiads. We
played two games and I beat him in a very good endgame, but my pride in
that sank when over the next week, Uzbek's rating dropped to below 2300.
When I logged in, I started to find messages from him: 'Look at my reiting
:-(' He now had an excuse in his notes: he was practically playing blindfold
- he didn't have ziics or another interface, and didn't want to
get it, was happy to type his moves, and use the incomprehensible ASCII-diagram.
I doubted that was true, but liked him anyway. He had a friend, he said,
Gavrik, also from Uzbekistan, and also living in Texas, who did
have ziics. 'Play him sometime,' he said. I looked up Gavriks notes, and
saw he had a rating close to 2500, which made it doubtful he would play
me, as I was then around 2100.
'Oh, he will play you,' Uzbek said.
'Why do you think that?'
'Because I'm him.'
And now he was also someone - and who knows who
else.
That's how I discovered you can always log in under
any unregistered name. I could become tragipawn myself, and ask Hardin
a few questions, Ajax to beat Feyenoord, God to crush Belsebub.
Internet's invisibility also makes various ways of cheating possible
- tempting, even. When my opponent spends a lot of time for his first few
moves, is he desparately browsing for our variation? When he never drops
the least pawn, is he using a computer? When he plays a few hundred points
better then last time, is a master friend playing for him?
Everybody wants to boost their ratings, and so do
I. You need a good rating to get good games, but the ego has its needs
too. Even if I am the only person in the world who knows I am Wakkeliwaan,
I still like Wakkeliwaan to have an impressive rating. I do want muffiman,
badloser, RubbishDump, and all the other anons to know he is good.
'Wakkeliwaan 2332', a few people, but from all around the world, will see
on their screens, and for an instant they will think: 'Not bad at all,
this Wakkeliwaan.'
To boost your rating, you can do things in ICC that
are not possible in over-the-board chess, but that are also not mentioned
in ICC's 'abuse'-file. It is officially abuse to use computers or strong
friends without telling, or to disconnect in a lost position and refusing
to resume - you can be banned for that. But what if I click a piece on
my screen and then do not play it? Is there a rule 'mouse clickée
- piece jouée'? Of course not - but if I play on a chess set and
move the pieces around? In slower games you could really analyse a position.
On 'rec.games.chess', I started a discussion about cheating in Internet
chess, and found that most people (10 out of 15) did not think analysing
while playing is really cheating. 6 respondents thought using books was
cheating, but 8 thought it was not, including ICC's boss, Darooha. A few
pointed out that what you will win in position, you will lose in time.
One American GM said he advocates the use of books on ICS as 'a
good way of learning and trying your openings.' None of my respondents
could really tell me how Internet chess should be viewed, or treated: as
over-the-board chess, or as very fast postal chess where all these practices
(and the use of computers) are en regle and even expected.
I would never use a computer, but I wondered: if
I do not use books, am I a gentleman, or just a sucker who gives everybody
else a 100-point headstart? So - I've done it on a few occasions. In one
game, my opponent let me follow my 25-year old book until it said I had
'strong play'. A few moves later I was hopelessly lost - having 'strong
play' is of little use when you have no idea of the wishes and dreams of
your pieces. Or maybe his book was better.
The biggest problem with Internet chess is 'netlag' - with all those
millions of computers communicating with each other all the time, there
are bound to be traffic jams; you have clicked your move, but your clock
keeps ticking as the move is stuck somewhere in a glassfibre-cable. In
one of my first games, in an even position just out of the opening, I clicked
my move, but nothing bleeped. All that happened onscreen was my digital
clock going down and down until a message appeared: 'Wakkeliwaan forfeits
on time.' When I was able to communicate again, my opponent was matter
of fact about it. 'Happens all the time,' he said. 'It will even out in
the end.'
I doubted that. Already, I had seen outcries on
my screen about so-called lagflaggers - people who took advantage
of their opponents lag and flagged them. Although I did not plan to do
this myself, I felt a certain compassion with these disdained lagflaggers
- if everybody did it, it would even out in the end, and nobody
would ever have to waste time thinking about true lag, faked lag, or clemency.
So I set autoflag ON, a feature that will flag automatically, him or me,
and knew I had some undeserved wins and losses coming.
That cost Wakkeliwaan the blackest day in his young
life. Soon afterwards I played a young German I'll call Verleumder. During
our second game, I saw a message about 'added time', and thought Verleumder
had added half a minute to his clock. I didn't like that very much - but
what the heck. Later, in a lost position, he overstepped the time limit,
and autoflag went off - 1-0 for Wakkeliwaan. But Verleumder was furious,
filling my screen with anger. He had given me extra time, and now this!
I saw the terrible misunderstanding - he had added time to my clock,
because he thought I had lag. How nice of him, ands how stupid of me -
of course it wasn't possible to add time to your own clock! But
if he had given me extra time, he'd done that because he thought I had
lost time, and in fact, I now realised I had been away from the
screen to get a glass of milk. That didn't change his genuinely having
overstepped the time limit. I tried to explain to him what had happened,
told him to stop whining when that didn't help, but he was still cursing
when I gave up on him.
Later that afternoon I played a Swiss I'll call
Jaccuse, and I really lagflagged him - without wanting to. After
12 moves, no more reply. As I started wondering whether autoflag was such
a good idea after all, the seconds ticked away. Maybe I should remove autoflag
for the following games - but now it was on. Was it possible to switch
it OFF during play - how? - but there it was already: 'Jaccuse forfeits
on time.'
When his lag was over, I discovered Jaccuse did
not share the insight that it will all even out in the end. 'F*ck you,
small player,' he cursed. 'Quit ICS....!' And on and on. I typed that I
had been on autoflag, was new to ICS, didn't know if it could be switched
off, would lose a token game to him to give his rating points back, but
when I sent my message, my screen said: 'Jaccuse has censored you'. He
had put a gag over my mouth - nothing I typed now would get through to
him. To my horror, I saw he hurled his indignation across the world, with
so-called 'shouts' that everyone can hear: 'Don't play Wakkeliwaan! He's
a lagflagger!' Before long, he went capital: 'WAKKELIWAAN LAG FLAGGER,
WAKKELIWAAN LAG FLAGGER. DONT PLAY WITH WAKKELIWAAN' Verleumder, apparently
noticing that, joined in on the top of his lungs: 'Jaccuse is right! Wakkeliwaan
is a lagflagger. Down with Wakkeliwaan!'
Powerless, fuming with frustration, I sat at my
screen, the pretty little white-and-green pieces still showing the final
position of my ill-fated game with Jaccuse. Then somebody named Made
shouted: 'Shame on Wakkeliwaan!!! Wakkeliwaan lagflagger!' The whole world
was suddenly sick of Wakkeliwaan. Amidst less offending messages like 'Nietzsche,
who was challenging you, has joined a match with konijn', Wakkeliwaan was
smeared and slandered, and there was nothing I could do. Not even BoneFish,
who told me: 'Good job... tee-hee, lag flaggers hurrah!!', could cheer
me up.
After a while, Jaccuse removed the gag, telling
me benevolently: 'You can speak now...' I gave him his win, and decided
never to play him again. I never heard from him either, but for a long
time, whenever Wakkeliwaan appeared in ICC, and Verleumder was there too,
he started foaming at the mouth, shouting: 'Watch out, the lagflagger has
arrived again,' until he was finally told by the adminstrators to stop
that.
I must admit I made one more blunder in the lagflag-domain - playing
someone who had obvious lag, and not yet knowing how to turn autoflag off
during a game. I guess Verleumder saw that, watching every step I took,
waiting to catch me at new misdeeds.
Maybe still is.
I did learn to toggle Autoflag.
Even allowing for the slander, I thought ICS was the most marvelous
invention since chess itself. What made it even more of a miracle was that
it was all free. My real-life chessclub charges some $ 90 yearly, and is
open a few hours every week, with always the same faces. Playing on ICS
didn't cost a cent (apart from the Internet access and the - local - telephone
costs), but it didn't stay free. In the middle of my frenzied playing
blitz game after blitz game, the news broke that it was going commercial
on march 1st. It renamed itself ICC (for Internet Chess Club), and was
now charging $ 49 per year. To entice us to become paying members, Daniel
Sleator aka Darooha, ICC's chief programmer and boss, had invented something
called 'timestamp'; a way of sending the time actually used along with
the move itself. That way, you could never be lagflagged again.
New to Internet as I was, I failed to see why something
like ICC should NOT cost money and I paid immediately, even if it was
a bit sad Eldorado should have changed into a first class hotel. In essence,
as tragipawn, Xmen and someone taught me, ICC is still a place where you
can play chess for free - although as an unregistered player, a good game
will be harder to get. But in 'rec.games.chess', a terrific uproar broke
out. Amidst posts sympathetic to his action, Darooha was accused of going
against the Internet spirit, hijacking ICS, being a dirty capitalist. The
original author of the program accused him of stealing the code - just
short of the words. When I interviewed Darooha onscreen in ICC, my screen
nearly exploded with texts machinegunned into it by a subsersive member
named Sneaker:
Do NOT support ICC!!!!! SAVE YOUR 50$!!!!!!!!!!
Commercialization of the ICC IS BULLSHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BE WISE AND SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
DAROOHA and POTZY are DEVIOUS, GREEDY CAPITALIST PIGS!!
A hundred times over, a bombardment of capitals and exclamation marks.
A boycott was proposed, and both in 'rec.games.chess'
and in ICC itself, the 'Free Internet Chess Server' (FICS) was advertised,
many disgruntled players saying they would take their chess there. But
ICC has not seemed less bustling since then, and it looks like FICS will
have some trouble convincing players to join. I play on FICS sometimes
too, but there is not nearly as much activity as in ICC. I am assured however
that everything on FICS (which runs on a computer located in Denmark) will
be at least as posh as on ICC in the future.
ICC, begun in 1991, has been on - and kicked out of - computers around
the USA, and is now located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Darooha, (who
has never physically met his cofounders of ICC, arcsin and POTZY) is a
41-year old professor of computer science at the famous Carnegie Mellon
University there. He works next door to Hans Berliner, was indirectly involved
with Deep Thought, and was at one time a colleague of Ken Thompson of Belle,
Unix and endgame fame. He points out ICC is not the first commercial games
club on the Internet - there is a paying bridge server, and there are several
other paying services. The earlier program, he says, was a cardboard shack
compared to the neat brick house he has built it into. He freely admits
that in going commercial he had two objectives: making money, and changing
ICC into a more serious chess club. He wouldn't mind at all to lose many
of the weaker players for whom chess is just an on-and-off passtime, and
who really log in to ICC to chat. He counts on having around 2500 paying
members in the end - GM's and IM's will be exempt. In fact, ICC pays them
to play blitz there, and give lectures.
Both FICS and ICC boast of the marvelous features
that they already have and will add soon. Whether one of them will prevail
in the end, or whether they will develop into complementary clubs - they
both are chessclubs of a kind it would have been impossible to imagine
even a few years ago.
(c) Tim Krabbé 1995
Postscript march 1998:
Many things changed of course, over the last three years. Before long,
I'll get around to tell what, and how. To start with, you could have a
look at ICC's homepage.