Correspondence Chess - Overview

Correspondence Chess is played now mostly on correspondence chess servers, some by email or by snail mail. In correspondence chess you are playing several games at the same time. For example all the games of one tournament or even all the games of all tournaments you start.

The international Correspondence Chess organization is ICCF. At ICCF you can play for the ICCF Worldchampionship title and for GM and IM titles.

As there are all forms of assistance allowed, including books, chess databases and  chess programs, competing in these tournaments isn't easy today.

Besides the analytical capabilities of the player, more often his hardware and software are decisive.

A player using Rybka 4 ( 2 - 3 of the other top chess engines ) and several 8-core PCs can still easily reach IM level in ICCF.
( Although it may not be enough to get the GM title or compete for the ICCF World Championship ).

But in this case the player isn't a player but a computer operator.

Because of that we think that the great days of correspondence chess are over. The problem is that you cannot enforce to prohibit chess engines and chess engines are stronger than 99.9% of all humans.
But OTB players should still check the games of the current correspondence chess top tournaments, as you can find there often opening novelties.

Here at Chessfriend.com we cover:

• The Correspondence Chess World Champions
• Tournament reviews of interesting correspondence chess tournaments