Internet Chess Club- The World's Most Active Chess Club

TC POSTAL CHESS

The proliferation of opening compendia and computers has changed the nature of postal chess from exciting innovative play to relative boredome, and recent advances in data storage and retrieval will shortly render the game "played out."  Is there a better way?  You bet there is!  It is known as TRANCENDENTAL CHESS (abbreviated TC).

This game-form transcends conventional chess in purity of purpose, making the game a contest solely between two individuals.

In TC, the pieces are placed randomly on the first and eighth ranks, castling is replaced by transposition, and the rest of the game is played in the traditonal manner.  In order to eliminate all traces of chance, the games are played in pairs (with the identical starting position for both games), and the game-pair is treated as a two-game playoff match.  Since there are 8,294,400 different starting positions, no player will be confronted with the same starting position more than once in his entire lifetime.  How's that for variety?

We also have Auction TC in which the contestants bid tempi for the side they wish to play.

There is no better way of sharpening one's chess-playing skills while having a ball doing it than by playing postal TC in our club.  Our magazine subscription price of $15 per year for eight issues includes membership dues.  Our tournaments feature 50%-70% cash payouts, we have a CHESS GEMS ladder contest leading to a free one year subscription, a DIVERTISSEMENT puzzler contest leading to a free tournament entry, and we also have annual recruitment and activity contests leading to free tournament entries.  We are currently in our sixteenth year of the way postal chess should be played.