Online games and protective measures

April 24, 2007 by SUM.

Since my student times I like to play chess. Christoph a medical student who rented the apartment above my flat-sharing community taught me this game. When I play chess I tune out and focus only on playing the game. After I played chess I’m invigorated for other tasks.

I started to play chess online when I worked at Microsoft. Microsoft had a chess club and an online chess ladder. At the time I worked at Microsoft it was allowed to play chess online during work hours. I just can talk for myself, I played a couple games and afterwards I felt energized and I worked more efficiently again.

Now I play chess online either on Pogo or on Yahoo Games. But there seems to be a problem with their servers. And yesterday was one of those days again.Yesterday, I played chess on Pogo and Yahoo Games. And on each server my chess games were frozen and the clocks stopped working. But the games had not been actually interrupted I just couldn’t move any of my pieces nor did I see the clocks ticking on my side. At each occurrence my time ran out and I lost the game because of some kind of manipulation.

The person on the other computer knew about it. This person just waited until my time ran out and told me that it had been my move, which I couldn’t execute. Therefore I lost the game because of time.

Since I play chess online I experienced this kind of manipulation so often, so that I seldom play chess online now. Yesterday, after Pogo acted all messed up, I decided to register again on Yahoo Games to try playing chess there, but the same thing happened there, too. My game was frozen, my clock was ticking, which wasn’t displayed, and I couldn’t make any moves.

The problem was not that the servers were overloaded; the chess tables were almost empty. It was the manipulation of time. Now this kind of manipulation is called cheating.

If you know of any chess site where players are protected against manipulation of time, please let me know because I would like to continue playing chess online but without manipulation of time or any other technical manipulation and/or illegal activity.

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