Play chess & poker games, online casino tips

FICGS is a free internet chess server and one of the most serious places where you can play chess games online. All players register under a real name to build a friendly community. You can also play Fischer random, Go and poker texas holdem in rated tournaments, 2 players matches and various championships. Advanced chess and correspondence chess are the main features but you can play board & cards games just for fun.

The biggest challenge remains to play the chess world championship that offers the opportunity to play the current champion in a 12 games match.

Even if computers domination extended to Go (围棋, 바둑, 囲碁, Го) since AlphaGo & AlphaZero were able to beat top players from China & South Korea, all these games remain a great exercise for the brain and of course a great pleasure. Have good games at FICGS.

Eros Riccio is new FICGS chess champion...

Eros Riccio won the final match of the 17th cycle, his challenger kindly accepted to answer a few questions and shared his views on correspondence chess and the influence of chess engines such as Stockfish, Houdini or Komodo, and the AlphaZero AI. You can read the complete interview in the forum.

There you may find some instructive tips on how to become a correspondence chess champion. Sometimes trying to win at any price may not be the best choice. Correspondence chess is not a matter of moves only, time and resources management is very important as well. As a well-known former world champion said, chess is like life and it is always more usual than expected to see elements from private life impacting a correspondence chess game, from a simple mouse slip to any events provoking a lack of time. Feel free to learn from these experienced players.

Chess, cards games & online casinos...

Of course, online gaming is not limited to chess & Go, the success of cards games such as blackjack & poker texas holdem is not to prove anymore and it continues to convert board games players. If some of them like to play blackjack, others also play games like backgammon, sometimes for money as well.

Other casino games are also very popular nowadays, in online casinos one can play a wide variety of games for free or for money. Certain websites allow you to compare many of these places and to get unique bonus offers such as free spins and 100% deposit bonuses, most often specifying what places are the most trustable. Bonuses are not everything though, it is worth reading on the interface, payment options, live events & other advantages.

All these informations can help poker & casino games players to learn without losing money before to hope to become professional players. Is texas hold'em the new king of games ? Maybe it happened already, but computers probably changed our vision of cards games just like it did at chess, xiangqi then Go. It is now announced that bots are to invade poker rooms, if it didn't happen already. Bots are able to play quite perfect poker, at least much better than the very best players. In a few years, only live tournaments will probably remain of interest for humans.

Stockfish, AlphaZero & future...

A few chess engines like Fire, Komodo & the famous Stockfish reached stratosferic levels years ago already, it is quite clear that no human can compete anymore. While centaurs may have an edge yet, artificial intelligence entered the battle, but not surely for the better. Many things have been said on the match played by Stockfish and Google Deepmind's monster "AlphaZero" already, obviously the battle was not really fair, firstly because of the hardware gigantic gape and also because of the lack of opening books, which is a big part of how is built a machine player.

Of course one can imagine that Google didn't take risks in such a match, surely knowing the result in advance. It is still hard to predict what will look like those machines wars in the future but what ruled the chess engines competitions until now may completely disappear to give the place to an unleashed world where the most powerful will probably crush all its rivals, whatever the way it was coded. In a way, brute force may continue to beat intelligence which is not such a surprise in an unruled world.

Definitely, chess is like life and that may not be the best way to see new improvements in chess engines & chess theory. Of course we'll probably see new lines to emerge but we may not be able to decode or to understand the way it was found by those machines of a new kind, just as it is still difficult to understand the way we think and solve problems.

Play chess online - FICGS

Eros Riccio is new FICGS chess champion...

Chess, cards games & online casinos...

Stockfish, AlphaZero & future...