Online Training and Playing
Chess Tempo: Great for daily tactics training. You can also train endgames, and play games against others, etc. Free, but you can upgrade to unlock more features. An alternative site, which is also free and very good, is chesspuzzle.net.
lichess: My go-to site for playing blitz games, but there are also learning and training features, and you can watch streams, play in tournaments, join teams, find a chess coach, etc. Free.
Chess24: A great site for news, multi-lingual high-level commentary of important tournaments, and they also have the usual training features, playing site, lots of instructional videos, e-books, etc.
Chessable: An interesting training site that uses spaced repetition; joined PlayMagnus and Chess24 in September 2019.
The four sites listed above are my main training sites (I also use ordinary books offline), but there are numerous other sites that are heavily used by many people; I won’t bother listing many others, as there are too many, and I have not used most of them. If you are a beginner, try Chess’n Math, or ChessEdu, or Chess Fox.
The site of Nigel Davies is good and has a links to a lot of other good sites. Other good sites for chess instruction are those of Dan Heisman and Alex Colovic, and there are a lot of good reviews at the site of Jeremy Silman.
Chess Cafe has an enormous amount of good content.
News and Information Sites
The Week in Chess: “Daily Chess News and Games. Weekly digest for download. By Mark Crowther.”
ChessTech: “ChessTech is a free newsletter and website bringing the latest technology news and hands-on knowledge to the international chess community.”
Chess Base: Besides news, this is a full-service web site, with playing area, giant database, lots of instructional material for sale, etc.
Chess Federation of Russia: News and interviews in English and Russian, but the instructional content appears to be only in Russian.
A useful database of chess games, both current and historical, can be found at chessgames.com. There is also a daily puzzle, and a database of tournament results.
Good sites for chess history are by Edward Winter and Ken Whyld. Some historical chess ratings can be found here.
For live chess ratings of the top players in the world, see 2700chess.
Tim Krabbe’s Chess Curiosities is quirky, but has a lot of interesting content, including content that will be interesting to devotees of chess problems.
A list of the top 100 chess sites in the world is here.
Chess Federations, Clubs, and Tournaments
The International Chess Federation (FIDE) home page is here.
The Chess Federation of Canada (CFC) home page is here.
The US Chess Federation (USCF) home page is here.
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