Why I Don't Really Enjoy Online Chess

I love to play chess. The best thing about chess to me is going to tournaments. I love going to tournaments. I enjoy sitting at the board and making moves. I like writing down notation. I even love hitting the clock after playing a move on the board. I like reading magazines and books and all these new ways to learn chess through the Internet. I love the act of learning and absorbing chess.

I have played a lot of online chess, about 10,000-15,000 blitz games since I started playing on the Internet Chess Club in 2008. I have played amateurs, masters, and grandmasters from all over the world. I have a zero percent record in all my games against grandmasters which I can count on one hand. The chess scene has only grown since 2008 and even more so in the 2020s with the debut of "Queen's Gambit" on Netflix in 2021.

So how come I do not enjoy the online arena? I should celebrate the growth of chess all over the world and it being part of the mainstream culture. All kinds of people are learning chess for the first time as adults which is amazing. My argument against online chess is not, "I'm against chess growth and these are the people who should play." No. That's ridiculous. My argument lies in the act of playing online.

We sit down at our computer or laptop, and we boot up a game. It's in the comfort of our own home and we didn't have to go anywhere to play. The pieces and the board are flat, mere representations of the character of the 3-dimensional pieces. We have an in-game clock which automatically starts the opponent's time every time we make a move. There is no button pressing at all. We can even do something called "pre-moving", making a move on the board before the opponent has made theirs, resulting in these ultra quick robot-like reflexes. There is no shaking hands at the beginning and end of the game. Is my opponent being gracious in victory and defeat? Does my opponent want to talk about the game? I don't know. I can't see their face. It's this unsurety that makes me uneasy.

The point is that online chess strips the act of playing chess to the moves and only the moves. Sometimes, it is difficult to see that I have a human opponent because my opponent is just a name on a screen. There are ratings, but to me they feel like a sham because they aren't real and don't conform to real over the board ratings in the slightest so we should never compare our IRL tournament performances with our online ones. This sometimes makes it difficult to track our own chess progress over time.

I don't have much against online chess myself other than my own experience with it. The above reasons are why chess over the Internet has become an extremely negative thing for me to the point where I don't want to play games online anymore. I'll play a few here and there but, for the most part, I enjoy playing in a space designed for chess such as a club or a park. There is a wonderful chess center here in Chicago and everyone there loves the game. There's no negativity and we're just having fun. Having fun is what chess is about and we should all find the way we have fun with chess.