Useful stuff

Chess Engines

If you are interested in computer chess or using computers for analysis there are several options;

Purchase one of the very user friendly GUI's that come with various engines, such as Fritz or Houdini.

Download a free GUI and a downloadable engine to use with it.  

The simplest one to get hold of is Tarrasch Chess and this comes complete with Stockfish, one of the world's strongest engines and allows pretty much everything needed to work through a game to see where it went wrong or play an extremely strong opponent.  Other engines can also be used, particularly you can update to the latest Stockfish.  It also comes with a database of games, not as many as you will find in Chessbase but plenty (>2.5 million).  I'm not sure if it is still being developed but the download is still available and it is excellent.

Lucaschess is apparently also very good, with training functions, opening book etc and a wider range of engines that can be added to as new ones come out.

Arena Chess is also a free GUI and this can be used with any downloadable engine.  It has many more features than Tarrasch but I found it correspondingly harder to get to do what I wanted.

Leelachess is an AI neural net chess engine which is free.  I haven't tried it out but I suspect you might need to be a bit more computer savvy. 

There are plenty of others out there but I haven't used them, so why not try them out?

On-line chess

There are quite a few online chess sites where you can either play for free (often after registration) or gain enhanced features through paying a subscription.  The Uckfield Chess Club has a group on chess.com where you can see some of the more ridiculous 'handles' that members of the club use.  It is also possible to see live commentary on running chess competitions and in certain cases play against a Grandmaster.  We are playing longer (daily play) games on chess.com and the League has run competitions on lichess.  Whatever takes your fancy, but with daily play you do have a chance to think about your moves, especially useful if you are learning the game.  Many of these sites have training features so you can improve your game, suitable for all levels.  I'm particularly fond of the puzzles.

https://www.chess.com      (which has probably the best puzzles and streamer community.  The tournament viewing capability is, however, really v poor.  They should sort this out.)   

https://chess24.com   (which was best for watching tournaments, but after being bought by chess.com has closed down apart from some references to their youtube channel)             

https://lichess.org   (which I think has the best playing interface and with the demise of chess24 will probably have the best interface for watching tournaments)

https://chesskid.com  (for children, many of the same things but more user friendly and only for children)

Other Organisations

Sussex Junior Chess-  an extraordinarily successful organisation for any junior player keen on the game - http://www.sussexjuniorchess.org  Training, competitions etc.

For local clubs in the Mid Sussex Chess League please see  -http://www.midsussexchess.org.uk which for the moment is the website of the Sussex Chess League after it changed it's name recently.  You will find the clubs listed there.

There are also one or two other chess groups in the area, not part of the league, certainly there used to be one in Forest Row and Edenbridge had a club based at the Social Club, but since I do not have contact details, good luck with that.  Crawley has a recently formed club and there is one near Heathfield.  Outside the bookshop on East Grinstead High Street are some boards  (and inside given the weather)  in addition to their club nights. East Grinstead is blessed with 2 chess clubs as there is also the East Grinstead Chess Club. Both have websites.  There are also clubs in Bognor, Chichester and Seaford if you're closer to them.  You should also be able to find a copy of Sussex Chess, an annual publication put together by Mick Plumb (of Bognor CC) that has news of all of the Sussex clubs and competitions.  I don't seem able to upload it here, probably a restriction of Google Sites. http://www.bognorandarunchessclub.co.uk/downloads.html  should take you to many years of Sussex Chess.

The English Chess Federation -http://www.englishchess.org.uk  runs chess in England, including the national team for Chess Olympiads etc. and they have an extensive website reporting on events nationally and internationally.  They are running online events on both lichess and chess.com which you have to join the online group to play in (it's free) but in order to play in over the board chess competitions you do need to be a member of the ECF, there are various grades of membership.  The ECF does not seem to be the most cohesive organisation though it is doing a decent job in difficult circumstances.

Within the ECF there are organisations representing the Southern Counties (Chess Union) and the Sussex County (Chess Association) which runs teams in the National Counties Championship, the individual Sussex Championships and a couple of team competitions (one of which we usually enter) but they do not seem to be very active at present.

FIDE is the international organisation that runs chess worldwide.  This has recently got new management which is probably good for the game but means that FIDE has lost some entertainment value. The previous head of FIDE was from Kalmykia, a predominantly Buddhist part of Europe and somewhere I've always wanted to visit.    As President of Kalmykia he had Chess City built, possibly not a budget priority for most places.  https://www.fide.com.

Chess news and online game sites include chess.com, chess24, lichess and chessbase. See above.  If you want to know who is top of the world ranking list...unofficially updated every day, go to https://www.2700chess.com. It will be Magnus Carlsen, in standard play atleast. 

If you really want to explore a whole variety of chess resources, https://schaak.startpagina.nl/ will give you hours of fun as it holds links to any number of individual sites.  I have noticed that Paul Morphy has a website, I wonder if he knows....or if he's still looking for his shoes (you'll have to look that up).  Chess has had it's fair share of oddballs...the first official world champion, Steinitz, would go off to a corner and telephone God for advice.  It takes all sorts...I don't think we have anyone like that in the Uckfield Club.

Rating (it used to be Grading in the ECF)

Any chess player that plays in a league or competition will end up with a national rating...and if you register with FIDE, an international rating.  Most countries have a rating system that uses a method based on that of Arpad Elo, a Hungarian (?) mathematician which uses statistics to estimate how likely players are to win a game based on their rating.  If you do better than you should, your rating increases.  The ECF has moved to an Elo system and numbers that will be broadly comparable to the FIDE international ratings.  These ratings are updated monthly and if you want to know what beating opponent x in a single game meant for your rating then you can find that out too.  The system hasn't settled down yet, so unless someone has played a fair few games, take it with a pinch of salt.