The idea of creating an email chess server began early in 2001. A few lines of codes were written to see if it is possible to make email chess easier. Could we establish a club where people can play chess simply by email? I know what huge efforts are needed to maintain an email chess club, but what are the computers for if not to take the hard and regular work from humans?
The club was founded in the middle of 2001, when a few obsessed and curious players were trying to use the system's first facilities. It had no name, and a lot of very useful things were still unsupported. But at least we could make moves. :-)
At the beginning of 2002 the club was deemed ready for the Internet public, most of the basic facilities needed to start and play games were working.
By the end of 2002 much work had been done and the following facilities were supported: the pairing system, PGN and FEN support, time controls, vacation policy, the reminder system, and a lot of other stuff were ready, such as starting games with standard openings, assigning colour during a challenge, friendly games, and the chess problem system, to mention only the major things.
On November 20, 2002 the club got it's final name, E4EC, which stands for E4 Emailchess Club, and e4ec.org became the club's Internet domain.
A few things remain to be completed in 2004. The biggest challenge is to support more types of tournaments.
In competitive chess, a player scores one point for a win, a half-point for a draw, and zero points for a loss. So the rankings at the end of a tournament are easy to calculate by simple addition.
In the early 19th century, when modern competitive play began, draws were ignored, and a match was won by the player who first scored an agreed number of wins, or who had the most wins after an agreed number of games. With the advent of all-play-all tournaments (the first international all-play-all was held in London in 1851) draws became more important. At first, rules were devised to discourage draws, which were very unpopular with the chess public, but gradually these were dropped and draws were counted as a half-point.
If we want to play a game with somebody but don't want it to change our results, the challenge should be sent for a friendly game.
It's useful if we want to analyze a setup, replay a game, or even only for practicing.
This can be combined well with starting games from predefined setups.
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