Xboard and why it's important

Xboard runs on top of gnuchess. Basically, it provides the graphical user interface that you and I have come to expect with chess playing software. That makes it very simple to play a game of chess against the computer or over the network.

The xboard program supports many options. Running the "man xboard" will give you the instructions you need to run the program standalone or by connecting to an internet chess server such as freechess.org. When you type "xboard" at the command line, you are going to be playing against the computer, by default. This is a tough computer to win against. But it's easy to play. All you do is click on the piece and move it with the mouse. The computer usually wins...

In fact, xboard also runs on top of the internet chess servers. So let's say I wanted to play a game of chess against someone, a real live person using xboard. What would I do? Well the man page says to issue the following command:

xboard -ics -icshost hostname

where "hostname" would be the particular internet chess server you wished to use. I use freechess.org but there are others. There is a list of them available on the freechess.org website.

Playing chess over the internet
GNUChess
Xboard and why it's important
How to play chess
How to connect to freechess.org
How to find a game
Conclusions
Resources

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