WuChess, a partnership between Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and ChessPark, a social network around online chess playing, launches today. It’s the “world’s first online chess and hip hop community” and will also include exclusive videos and mp3 of the “hottest cats in hip hop.”

See a tour of the service here. That’s as far as most of you’ll get on WuChess, because, incredibly, they’re charging $48/year to join. ChessPark, by contrast, at least has a free version (but no videos or mp3s, sadly). The company promises to donate “a portion of the profits” to the Hip Hop Chess Federation.

Awesome. Hip hop, chess and $48 per year – definite winner.

See our coverage of CrowdChess as well, which has put itself up for sale following a WSJ blog mention.

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CrowdChess, which we covered last year, has initiated a match against chess Grand Master Gawain Jones, one of the top ranked players in England. CrowdChess members have twelve hours per turn to debate and vote on each potential move, at which point the winning move will be executed.

The game will be worth watching to see how the “wisdom of the crowds” fares against the GM, but I fear that the voting system used is too democratic. In the current setup, each vote is weighted equally, independent of experience or rating. The concept of having a “human super computer” capable of beating any challenger is compelling, but we’ll never see anything like that if the voting pool is watered down by people who are clueless.

Crowdsourced chess matches against well-known figures are nothing new. In 1999, MSN Gaming Zone held “Kasparov versus The World”, a four month long chess match that Kasparov called “the greatest game in the history of chess.” The winner? Kasparov, after 62 moves.

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I am all for tapping into crowd intelligence, and the Web is letting us do that in very interesting ways (see Digg, Wikipedia, Threadless, Freebase, Wikinvest, Kaltura, LingoZ, ZiiTrend, etc.). But does everything need to be crowdsourced? I wonder if a group of amateurs playing CrowdChess will ever be able to beat a grandmaster (or the modern-day version of Deep Blue, for that matter)?

Or will technology, in this case, take something beautiful and destroy it. Can’t two people just sit in a room and play chess?

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