Normal moves
Moving the pieces on your electronic chessboard is very straight forward. You can either lift the pieces up and put them down again on the target field or you can slide them to their destination. When sliding, there is a slight risk that the board detects and transmits the move before it is finished. In that case you should increase the move latency in the Chessconnect options. The optimum value depends on your sliding speed and the brand of your board. Typical values are between 250 and 500 milliseconds. The higher the value, the less likely it is that the boards transmits too early. But you will experience a short delay between when your move is finished and when it appears on the web site.
Other than that, playing with an electronic chess board is pretty much the same as with a regular board.
Taking
When you want to take one of your opponent’s pieces, the best way is to first remove your opponent’s piece and then move your piece onto that square.
Castling
Castling moves are done in the same way as in normal play. You move the king two fields to one side and move the rook from that side over the king.
The move will be transmitted to the web site once the king has been moved two fields.
Castling in Chess9601
Castling in Chess960 differs from regular chess. The best way to do this to first remove both the king and rook from the board and then place both pieces back onto their target fields. Again, the move will be transmitted, once king and rook have been removed from the board.
There is an exception for the ChessUp board: I had to do some tricks to get Chess960 to work on this. Therefore, you have to lift one of the rooks three times to indicates a castle move towards the side of this rook. Yes, I know it’s weird but at least I made it work. 🙂
Pawn promotion
The best way to perform a pawn promotion is to remove the pawn from the board and then immediately put the promoted piece (e.g. a queen) onto the back rank. Boards with full piece recognition will automatically detect the new piece and Chessconnect will perform the promotion on the chess site automatically.
If the pawn promotes by taking another piece it is best to first remove this piece and then perform the promotion as described above.
On a chess board without full piece recognition (e.g. Tabutro Sentio, DGT Pegasus) a dialog will pop up in the browser tab where Chessconnect is running asking you to what piece the pawn shall be promoted.
For these boards there is also a shortcut to circumvent this dialog2:
You lift the pawn and then place it onto any other free field that is not on the back rank. This will indicate that you want to promote to the piece that in the starting position was on the same column as the the field on which you put the pawn. Yes, I know, that sounds complicated. But let me give an example to make this more transparent: Assume, you want to move your pawn from e7 to e8 and make it a queen. You can then either move from e7 to e8 and answer the question dialog or you can lift your pawn from e7 and move it to any free field on the d-file that is not a bank rank field (i.e. d2 to d7). In the starting position, the queens are on the d file. So, the pawn will be promoted to queen. Should you want to promote to knight, you choose a field on either the b or g file. c and f files are for bishops and a and h files are for rooks. Easy enough, right?