You can monitor games of other players in progress with the button Follow below the players list or with the button Watch below the games list.

 

 

The difference between the buttons is that the button Follow automatically shows the next game of the same player when he starts a new game. To "kibitz" means to watch a chess game in progress.

 

If you double-click an entry in the games list you will get a board and can follow the action there. You can chat with other spectators and discuss the game with them. You can also employ a chess engine (in menu Engine) and use that to analyse the board position.

 

Some things to note

   If you want to move pieces on the board, you must unplug the transmission. You can do this for example with "Receiving Moves".

 

 

You can also press Ctrl-U to unplug and plug back into a transmission.

 

   There is also a separate analysis board which you can open in a separate window.

 

   At the top corner of the board window you will find a number of buttons:

 

 

These can be used to start a chess engine (see above), change the 3D board settings, applaude White or Black, fetch info on White or Black and plug or unplug the transmission. Unplugging the transmission means that you have full control over the board but the game will not updated any more from the server until you plug in again by clicking the same button.

 

Kibitzing in the Engine room

When saving games you have watched in the engine room the first evaluation is saved as commentary. In previous versions this was only the case for games that you played yourself.

 

In the Engine Room on playchess.com our computer chess users test their chess engines with their own opening books and individual system configurations. For kibitzing, e.g. watching games as they are played, there is a limit: you can watch a maximum of 100 games per day.

 

One of the reasons for this is that before there was this limit, many users were automatically watching umpteen thousand games per day and in doing so creating an extremely high demand on the server. Also this should motivate users to try out for themselves their engine configurations by playing them themselves.

 

Please take also a look here ....