We designed PawnShark and built it on three continents with one goal in mind, "to create a currency enabled chess community where friends can play friends."

"What about cheating?" Was the biggest question on all our minds.  We decided to build a "Community chess" where a user could find a user, view a comprehensive history, communicate, see their picture, and make a friend. PawnShark's "chess community" concept is in direct contradiction with that of common chess sites today where random people play random people. Randomness allows shady players to have no accountability to anyone. Hence friends should play friends. Now this doesn't obviously prevent cheating; it just minimizes the likelihood of cheating since you are playing against friends. To actually prevent cheating we built a cheater onitoring system based on clever algorithms and complex mathematics.  The cheat system monitors cheating per chess move as opposed to an overall game so our chess community can rest assured that PawnShark is a cheat-free environment.

One of the final hurdles we faced was related to how we should offer a more complete site with options for all chess enthusiasts. The solution was found via a handful of patents held by an institutional worker who had invented methods of chess he used to get inmates excited about the game. These methods where perfect and with our consulting expertise, we guided the client through the entire process. We strengthened offensive and defensive game play, catered to offensive or defensive players, and allowed for a more advanced strategy.

One of the final decisions was the ranking system. As great as the Elo has been for the sport of chess, its design and functionality are all intended for one type of play, face to face, not for large online chess servers that have thousands of people coming and going hour by hour and day by day. The Elo has no problem managing antonymous groups of chess players in a controlled tournament setting, but the shear magnitude of players online simply overloads the Elo and creates what is referred to as a "bounce effect" that leads to an unremitting shift in ratings. The "Elo bounce" is a term used to explain this rolling phenomenon in online chess ratings. You will find that unless you are within the bottom or top five percentile, your rating will bounce up and down as you play opponents, that even though ranked lower than you are, are actually far more versed in the game or vice versa. The Elo bounce problem makes it impossible to accurately match same skill level players against one another, and the instantaneous rating changes would promote widespread sandbagging, which in turn would allow some players to easily prey on beginners, fleecing them out of their hard earned money. Because of the chess world's addiction to the Elo, a sort of crutch has manifested itself in a game that has thrived far too long to need one. The crutch is that chess players place way too much stock on their Elo based ratings. In turn, rampant cheating has flooded the online world, even seeped into live tournaments. Plain and simple, the chess world has an unhealthy obsession with the Elo.