Besides the games I play for Hackney Chess Club and the BBC Chess Club I don't really get to play in real life. I've played the 5, 10 and 15 minute games online and while they're fun (if feeling your heart in your mouth while sitting in front of a laptop is your idea of fun) I remain unconvinced that they help your overall chess skills.
The first games I played online before I joined the clubs and what probably got me back into chess were on Facebook. I used one of the many chess apps available but rather than live chess there would be a 3 day time limit on each move. This worked pretty well and at times I'd set up a board to look at a position.
So now I've started playing games on the iPhone but without a time limit using the Fritz and Shredder apps. There's time to think about the position, it's possible to go back, run some analysis in retrospect. Typically I play a move and look again a couple hours later. I was using the feature in Shredder where it adapts its ranking according to the result of the last game it played against you but I found its faux mistakes (like giving away a piece randomly) annoying. So for the last few games I've stuck to playing Fritz on the strongest setting. I've also stuck to playing the opening repertoire I plan to use when the new season kicks off.
In his very useful book Studying Chess Made Easy, Andrew Soltis points out that at the end of the day there is no silver bullet and the way to get better at chess is to spend a lot of time studying it on your own. At the moment given my time constraints playing on my phone seems like the best option.
[Update 14/09/10: There's a review of the Andy Soltis book (Studying Chess Made Easy) I mentioned above on the Guardian's website where it's been nominated by Daniel King on their "2010 Book of the Year short-list". I'm guessing he means "Chess Book of the Year short-list". Good as the book is you probably need to be a chesser to appreciate it.]
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