Everyone has heard the phrase “it’s like a game of chess.” This comparison is often used to describe situations defined by a battle of intellect, cunning, and intuition. For example, professional football coaches spend their entire practice week preparing for every possible situation that their competition can throw them. On gameday, they carefully choose the move that gives them the best possible chance to win. This is done over 60 times a game — certainly a stressful experience that can be compared to a chess game.

Chess remains the golden standard for intellectual competitions. Again, using the comparison to football, each move in chess is strategically calculated. An advanced player not only knows each possible situation resulting from a particular move, but can also predict their opponent’s reaction. This competitive banter of the minds is what separates an advanced player from a casual player. Today, many popular games are compared to chess, including football, poker, and many other chess spin-offs.

While many modern games mimic the intellectual competition of chess, the game of chess continues to grow further away from the current and upcoming generations of the United States. In other countries, such as the Phillipines, chess is the most popular game in the country. Letting one of the most educational and intellectually stimulating games fade in the midst of realistic videogames and pointless shoot-em-ups is certaintly a tragedy.

Fortunately, while chess seems to fade in popularity, two websites have taken the extra step in bringing a presence of chess to the internet.

Learning and mastering the game of chess requires repetition and practice, two things that can only be accomplished by playing the game. Unfortunately, many online chess servers require payment and subscription. Chessboss.com and Americachess.com aim to provide a free online chess server that allows players young and old to practice against other, real players from all around the world. This ability to practice against other minds, to play against players that are better and more advanced, allows a player to learn from his or her own mistakes.

The online chess servers offered at both ChessBoss.com and AmericaChess.com provide this service to anybody on the Internet, free of charge. Furthermore, these servers are fully integrated with Facebook, allowing players to invite and challenge their Facebook friends to a chess game. As players play chess, their win-loss record, VIP points, and title are displayed, giving each player something to strive towards. New players enter the server as a “Chess Mouse” and can progress all the way past “Chess Cat”, “Chess Dragon”, and “Chess Bull” to obtain the greatest title: Chess Samurai.

In the near future, ChessBoss.com will be offering tournaments as well, in two different forms. In the first monthly tournament, ChessBoss.com will be offering $500 of prizes to winners of a variant of chess called ChessCube. In the second monthly tournament, the winner will be branded a “Chess Samurai” for a month. These tournaments are free and players of all skill and ages can participate. The server and the tournaments instill a competitive factor in players required to increase skill.

In addition to the services offered by the chess server and chess tournaments, both ChessBoss.com and AmericaChess.com are informational resources on chess. If an individual is seeking information about different variants of chess, types of chess tournaments, or famous chess players, the websites provide them with articles and specific sections for each of those topics and many more. All of the information is free and easily accessible to anybody with an internet connection.

For example, on ChessBoss.com is a section with informative articles on how to learn chess. In the section are articles about chess strategy, tactics, and tips on how to win a chess game. One article offers 5 different tips to players on how to win a game, while others teach players how to keep a chess clock alive or how to properly end a game.

Increasing the popularity of chess should be a priority not only to enthusiasts and believers of chess, but parents and educators around the nation. Chess offers a fresh way to teach friendly competition, thinking, and mental discipline to each person who decides to learn it. This is particularly true for children, as their brains are continually growing and learning. Chess helps educators encourage the intellectual development of the children they aim to educate, allowing the children to learn to make their own decisions, think ahead, and analyze situations.

This goal is pushed forward by both ChessBoss.com and AmericaChess.com with their commitment to bringing a game and sport fading in popularity back to prominence among the youth and online chess community. With enough support, both of these websites can grow to a point where children talk in schools about their ranking and claim bragging rights over chess games.

As mentioned before, chess is the standard for intellectual games. Since it was invented in Europe in the 15th century, billions of people have been influenced by its presence. It is recognized as a sport by the International Olympic Committee. Around the world, there are thousands of chess tournaments, competitions, and clubs and millions of people playing online and in person. As Benjamin Franklin wrote in his article “The Morals of Chess” in 1750, chess teaches foresight, circumspection, and caution, three qualities that prove useful in almost every aspect of life. It is this enlightenment and education that chess provides to the world.

ChessBoss.com and AmericaChess.com hope to provide the game of chess with a revival, especially among youth in the United States. Offering a free online chess server accessible through Facebook, both websites provide players seeking competition and improvement a community in which to do so. Both websites also offer information to people who are seeking it, making them two of the best chess websites on the Internet.