I used to be really in to chess, and really pretty good at it, too. But I never had anybody to play against, and I've played - maybe - three games in the past five years. I have a friend (my roommate, actually) who is a master, and frequently competes nationally. He keeps wanting to play me, but we never get around to it.

The biggest problem I have with chess is that I want to customize it. I mean more than the pieces - I like to change the rules around. And most serious chess players get really anal if you want to play the game with different rules. Though I did know someone back in middle school (egad, the dawn of time) who really enjoyed playing under adverse conditions. I played a game with him once which he played the entirety of with his eyes closed. The rules were that he could open his eyes three times in the game, and had to open them before his move and close them again immediately after. That was a really neat game - he opened his eyes all of once the entire time, and still beat me nine ways to Sunday.

I think if you're going to do a RinkWorks chess feature, a neat thing to do would be alternate ways of playing the game. It could be a big section with different rules sets and slight variations, and we could send you our best ideas. I think that could be really neat (provided, of course, that you don't want to write the engines to let us play our variants online ;-}).

Dar "What's wrong with this move? I mean *besides* mate-in-one" ien