Online chess play for money

Hello all,

i don't know if this topic is already written, but i hope its none of problem to post it again?

i wanna know if you guys can tell me is there any site were i can play chess for money? Tournaments, or just 1vs1 plays...

don't play chess for money please. Your ego will be broken, we are weak players, all of us.

why would ANYONE play a game of complete information without any randomness (like chess) against a stronger player for money?

it just doesn't make sense, and people aren't THAT stupid, of course.
any place that offers any such kind of service is plagued by two massive problems - cheaters and sandbaggers. it's already hard enough to prevent cheating in titledplayers-only internet events!

I looked it up and ICC offers some monetary prizes for chess tournaments, but the problem is that at your skill level (and mine) you aren't going to be winning those tournaments. Your best bet is in OTB tournaments where you're competing against players of similar ability.

@Lightsss

You could easily make online money-tournaments that interest ALL levels or chess players.

Use a little creativity:

For example make a bullet tournament that has normal prizes and then bounty prizes to top 10 biggest underdog wins (determined by rating difference).

This would appeal to all levels of players because a weaker player can flag a much stronger player.

The ONLY problems are cheating with chess computers and sandbagging. So if there was no cheating in chess, we would already have scores of chess professionals, it would be like poker.

But since the idea is solid and a lot of people want chess for money, I'd suggest making internet cafe like physical places that are connected to other such places creating a player pool that are all playing outside of home in an environment that can be monitored.

This is the vision. Live casinos won't do it, because they get more money from machines, even live poker at casinos is just to get people in, the rake doesn't do much for live casinos.

But maybe chess lovers will get together one day and create a system for this, it could be a network of bars, coffee shops and internet cafes all over the world connected and creating the player pool.

so what are you doing about sandbaggers? and what's the incentive for "average" players?

we have some good formats like bitchess hyperbullet (very short time control = MUCH easier to spot cheaters) and chesscom's titled tuesday (closed player pool with verified ids, which also makes it much easier to deal with cheaters), and they work great because there's no hassle or cost to anyone, you can just join or leave as you wish.

once you want people to pay to compete online, it all falls apart.
also, these are all tournaments. online 1v1 "casual money games" will never work unless there are big egos involved.

@Lightsss

Sandbaggers would have to to controlled "manually", with reports and detection team. But since the playing locations are physical you can demand a real id to register and dish out life time bans. What then, they start getting plastic surgery and fake id's to sandbag again? :D

Well an avarage player could also win a bounty, also you can put in players with bounty no matter the rating difference, you can even make it so that the bounty player plays all games as hyper vs a low enough opponent... really you can create all sorts of interesting fun games and formats and constantly evolve the thing.

I mean this site hosts a lot of variants, make new variants, reinvent chess to work so that all skill levels can win, just use creativity.

@NoLuckOnlySkill

Damage control?
;D

so regarding the whole giving id and moving somewhere to play.. and costs associated (not only to the players but to the organizers).. just play otb?

i could be wrong on this but i hate the idea. we'll see when another brave chess entrepreneur comes up :p

@Lightsss

I understand this is not ideal, it's just a vision and it would be so much easier if people just were honorable and didn't cheat.

OTB is great, but online you can have big player pools and you have no problems with cheating in time and pieces getting knocked over in the midst of fast moving (both very common in OTB blitz tournaments).

Maybe somebody smarter than me will pick up this idea and evolve it :D