South Africa Chess Site Takes On the World

By Paul Vecchiatto
Posted: 29 August 2008
 
Local chess portal http://www.chesscube.com will use real-time live streaming to deliver commentary from several of the game's grandmasters during the Word Chess Championships, in October.
 
Chesscube, founded by four-times former South African champion Mark Levitt, has slowly been making moves into the highly-contested arena of sites and portals on the Internet.
 
Levitt says Chesscube has 145 000 registered users, with an average of 1 400 users on the site daily.
 
“Chess and the Internet suit each other and, because of that, it is a very competitive section to be in. But I think the advent of the Internet has helped bolster the popularity of chess,” he says.
 
The World Chess Championships will take place between reigning champion Viswanathan Anand and previous world champion Vladmir Kramnik, in the German city of Bonn, from 14 October to 2 November.
 
Levitt says the “Chess Cinema” service that users will see will be totally live, with graphics that are directly synchronised with the chessboards.
 
“It will be the test case for our Chess Cinema, that we hope will evolve into the iTunes of the chess world.”
 
Because of the heavy bandwidth constraints posed by Chesscube, due to it receiving more than three million search engine results per day and the demand on its services, its servers are hosted in other countries, such as Germany.
 
“It is far cheaper to host overseas than here. But we do all our development in SA,” Levitt notes.
 
People using Chesscube are located all over the world. The countries that supply the most users are India, followed by the US, Philippines and Saudi Arabia, with SA coming fifth. Other countries are Russia, Brazil and the UK.
 
“The Indians are very big into their chess, but the real surprise was the number of users out of Saudi Arabia,” Levitt says.
 
But even chess is not safe from fiends. “One of our projects is to build secure anti-cheating software – for some people winning is everything.”

.. This new 'Web' chess site, is admittedly "free"; but I just registered and played one opponent {and won}.. and their interface is noticeably inferior to "Caissa's Web'; except for 2 different somewhat cute, sound effects, that take place whenever a move or capture is made.
 
Incidentally, every time you log-on to their site, {upon registering}, their chess-interface download, involves about a 40 second wait!..