What is instant chess?

Instant chess is a revolutionary way to play chess which includes Internet chess servers and chess-lovers from the entire world. This is a way to play chess online against another player in real-time, without meeting in the same place and time.

This is so exciting because you can encounter any player in any part of the world so you never know what to expect! This amazing feature of chess has brought a lot of changes to the worldwide chess community.

Now, playing an instant chess game with anyone in the world is easy fun entertainment, thank you internet!

The great part of all of this is the massive advance that this represents to chess, now discovering your chess potential and improving is no problem. Literally, all the tools to improve in chess are on the internet right now, tournaments, live chess, online ELO rating, everything.

I want you to imagine just how amazing this sounds; imagine the connections you can make. Thanks to technology nowadays you can even play against real chess grandmasters!

It’s awesome that instant chess exists, everyone can get enjoy a jovial chess game with anyone in the world while chatting and sharing.

Instant chess: How everything started…

Instant chess first appeared in 1992 when the first online chess platform was created, and no, it wasn’t chess.com, the first instant chess server was called: Internet chess club.

But we could say all of this online chess idea was the product of something older and with more history than that. Did you how grandmasters used to play chess from the distance even before the Internet?

There was something called Correspondence chess, which was just exactly instant chess as we know it now, lacking the “instant” part…

Players would send the moves over the mail and reproduce the moves in an original board. The correspondence was invented around the seventeenth century and played this way by many chess masters of that time. Later on, institutions like International Correspondence Chess Federations (ICCF) were created to formalize correspondence chess high-level competitions.

Of course, the process was extremely slow; this is why many correspondence chess games could last even for years. The control time was 10 days to play 1 move; it was like having a turtle deliver your moves for you.

There was even a correspondence chess world champion title that players could achieve in special correspondence chess tournaments.

The correspondence chess then passed to be instant chess when the internet was invented, but the whole idea came from the chess competitions via mail.

Instant chess impact on the chess community

Now that instant chess games are so easy to play, some chess competitions take place via the Internet. Especially in the times of the Covid-19 lockdown, chess competitions like FIDE world chess competitions 2020 were played on internet chess servers.

There are even chess titles for good players on the internet chess community, which are the arena titles (ACM, AFM, AIM, AGM). If you are interested in earning one of these titles check out arenafide.net.

But even so, some recognized instant chess competitions are not necessarily carried out by FIDE. My personal favorite is the Titled Tuesday blitz tournament on chess.com, many masters play wild games for a cash prize! The best is that anyone can watch it live!

You can also see the Speed Chess Championship (SCC) via chess.com too, it is a fantastic tournament with the highest-level players. The last 2020 SCC was disputed among this elite of players: Hikaru Nakamura, Vachier Lagrave, Magnus Carlsen, Wesley So, Levon Aronian, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Alireza Firouzja, and more.

An elite-level event for everyone to watch comfortably from home, and guess what? With 250.000 USD in prizes! We chess-lovers should appreciate how instant chess has given us a lot more ways to enjoy chess.

The importance of the Instant chess

We have already discussed the superb changes that instant chess has done throughout history to chess players in general. As I’m a chess coach, I will give you some ideas about how to use this to boost your chess learning.

You can find many ways to train your chess online; one cool way is like subscribing to my course, for example, watching some live streams or contacting grandmasters on the internet.

Also, there are things to learn on instant chess games, there is a whole new chess base just in online games played by chess servers like lichess.com or chess.com. Analyzing these games or watching masters analyzing these games on live stream can be just like hiring a chess coach, why not?

The Internet has provided us with numerous ways of improvement and learning in every area, and chess is not the exception. Well, finally the best you can do is playing some nice instant chess games; nothing will make you improve as practice will.

Instant chess nowadays

Now in 2021, instant chess is a really fun way to spend your time and it’s lovely how people have embraced other people’s work on the internet. This goes for every sport/art on the internet, but what I mean by this?

GM Hikaru Nakamura, GM Aman Hambleton, WFM Alexandra Botez, and many others create free content for everyone to watch on twitch or youtube. Even they created an incredibly fun association (I actually don’t know how to call it, but it’s genius!) named “PogChamps”.

Here many popular streamers participate in a special chess tournament with a generous pool of prizes! This was a great initiative from the chess personalities Alexandra Botez and Hikaru Nakamura, that were providing comment to the tournament.

This event is pure fun and definitely incredible to draw more people in the joyful community of instant chess worldwide. This way more people will know just how fun and unifying chess could be.

So if you really want to spend a good time, you can check out these live streams where you will learn a lot (that’s for sure) and you can interact with these great streamers!

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