Chess960 on Chesscube.com

In my previous post on chess960 (see Lesson in Chess960 Opening Patterns), Tom Chivers commented that Chesscube.com offers crossboard chess960 play. Lately I've been hearing a lot about Chesscube and have been meaning to check it out, so I acted on the latest nudge and registered with the online play server.

A recent post on the site's inhouse blog (see Scaling up ChessCube) pegs the intro of the chess960 service to mid-September, making it fairly new. Except for a popup titled 'About Chess960' and numerous pointers to Wikipedia's page, there isn't much on the site about chess960 itself. After explaining the rules of the variant, the popup finishes, 'simply castle by picking up the king and putting it on top of the rook - the ChessCube interface will then move the rook and king to their final squares'. I'm glad I read that before playing. It's not intuitive.

The blog introduction says, 'ChessCube CEO Mark Levitt, shares his team's experiences in building an Internet Chess Business', while the profile places Levitt at 'Cape Town : Western Cape : South Africa'. The Chesscube.com domain registrant is listed as AvSoft cc, also of South Africa.