Online chess
chess played over the Internet
Online chess is chess that is played over the Internet, allowing players to play against each other. This was first done asynchronously through PLATO and email in the 1970s. In 1992, the Internet Chess Server facilitated live online play via telnet, and inspired several other telnet-based systems around the world. Web-based platforms became popular in the 2010s and grew considerably amid the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside a trend of livestreaming chess.
History
Asynchronous
Online chess has existed in various forms including PLATO and play-by-email since the dawn of the Internet in the 1970s.
Chess servers
Internet chess servers were the first way to play live chess against a human opponent via the internet. In 1992, Michael Moore and Richard Nash developed the American Internet Chess Server (ICS), which allowed users to connect via telnet. Graphical interfaces were developed to improve upon the text-only experience. In 1994, developer Daniel Sleator, who improved the server's code to address several bugs, copyrighted it and commercialized the server as the Internet Chess Club. Frustrated former users and developers began improving the older code to launch the Free Internet Chess Server.
The public source identifies “Online chess” as chess played over the Internet. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Online, chess and played.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q105123086. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1992 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Online chess” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.