Media comments on chess

[Stewart Reuben]

Paul Allan, British Scrabble Champion in the Sunday Times 10 November.
'Scrabble is not like chess, where you know the answer from previous experience; you never see the same thing twice.'

I used to play scrabble for money 1963-5 at the Chess and Checkers Club of New York. He isn't at all correct. He says there are 3 million possible permutations in scrabble, but I can't believe there are so few. There are just a few more in chess! But you do see the same thing twice.
Experience shows you, that if you have the letters I N G, it is likely to will be able to make a 7 letter past participle.

If you have 'a' triple letter square with 'i' below, then placing the x yields 50 points with the words ax
i
But they do handle flag fall better. For every minute you go down, you lose 10 points.

[Stewart Reuben]

The third leader in today's Times was headed OPENING GAMBIT. It was about the World Championship and offered the opinion that there were 600 million players in the world, but only 6 million in Britain. Time to start playing here again.

The World Championship can certainly reach parts other chess activity cannot reach. Of course as usual the word 'Gambit' was applied inappropriately. If we really have 1% of the world's chess population, that is about right on demographics.

Even so, a welcome piece of publicity for our game. Their leaders are always anonymous.

[Roger de Coverly]

It was about the World Championship and offered the opinion that there were 600 million players in the world, but only 6 million in Britain. Time to start playing here again.

That's the Agon hypothesis again. This was based on an extrapolation from answers to the question "Do you play chess once a year?".

The Streatham blog examined the claim from a critical viewpoint.

http://streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.c ... f-fun.html

The ECF knows how many players take part in ECF graded events. On top of that there's participation in the UK Chess Challenge and other junior only events. The headcount of those in the UK playing on-line chess only isn't known. You could probably make a total of serious or semi-serious players add to 60,000 but that's a long way from 6,000,000 which would have to include anyone who started up the free program bundled with Windows to have any plausibility.

[Stewart Reuben]

There are far, far more people who play the occasional game of non-competitive chess than you postulate. I think the 6 million might be - those who roughly know the Laws.

[Paul Buswell]

Way back in the early 80s there was a survey - part of the big Target Group Index ones I seem to recall - which returned a figure of 9% (I believe - maybe it was 7%, definitely not lower) of the population (age 16+??) ever playing chess, which at the time I assumed to include those just playing at home maybe once a year or so.

PB

[Stewart Reuben]

Earlier, much earlier in this thread - or another covering the same matter - I had mentioned the TGI survey. I think it included children. The question was something like, 'Have you played chess in the last three months?' The numbers were about 4 million in Great Britain. I was deeply suspicious of that number, but trotted it out whenever it might work to the advantage of chess, just as Agon has done recently. One reason for my suspicion was that the ratio of males to females was said to be about 2:1. But the TGI figures do offer some corroboration of the Agon one.

The numbers far exceeded those playing bridge and, if I remember correctly, exceeded cricket. The latter, of course, is mainly a spectator sport among adults.

[David Gilbert]

And if you're thinking of putting your chess kids through University….
http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/chess-pla ... oar-153758

[Angus French]

There are far, far more people who play the occasional game of non-competitive chess than you postulate. I think the 6 million might be - those who roughly know the Laws.

The S&BCB post to which Roger refers provides links to the YouGov survey results for several demographics. For the UK, from a sample size of 4,161 adults (age 18 and above):
- 2% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a week;
- 3% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a month (but not as often as once a week);
- 7% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a year (but not as often as once a month).

Given that the UK adult population is about 50 million and 12% of that is about 6 million...

[Matt Mackenzie]

That is still 3 million or more who have a basic knowledge of the rules, then.

If RdC's estimate above is correct only about 2% of that sample play "seriously" - room for improvement?

[Ian Kingston]

From the BBC News Magazine: 10 reasons chess may never make it as a spectator sport.

Once again the use of 'match' when referring to a game, although as the correct term is used elsewhere I suspect the hand of a sub-editor.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Oh, oops, I put a link to this article in the other thread as well.

[JustinHorton]

There are far, far more people who play the occasional game of non-competitive chess than you postulate. I think the 6 million might be - those who roughly know the Laws.

The S&BCB post to which Roger refers provides links to the YouGov survey results for several demographics. For the UK, from a sample size of 4,161 adults (age 18 and above):
- 2% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a week;
- 3% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a month (but not as often as once a week);
- 7% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a year (but not as often as once a month).

Given that the UK adult population is about 50 million and 12% of that is about 6 million...

That's basically right. Although my feeling is, like Stewart's, that the UK may hold six million people who actually know how to play, the figure of six million who play at keast once a year can be derived from the actual data. Now obviously you'd want to know how representative the sample was, you'd want to see more surveys and research etc, but it's not actually an illegitimate figure even if it seems extremely high.

But we also know that the world figure of 600+ million is illegitimiate, that it cannot be properly derived from the data, that it appears nowhere in the original research and that it was used without consultation with the researchers. No explanation has been given of where it comes from, and at this stage we can only conclude that no such explanation exists.

[JustinHorton]

Incidentally, there was an item on the world championship about halfway through the main TVE1 news (equivalent to BBC1) in Spain on Monday night. Some footage of Anand-carlsen - and then of Fischer-Spassky and Kasparov-Karpov - was followed by some film of kids playing chess and a brief interview with a couple of people who teach chess in schools.

[Angus French]

There are far, far more people who play the occasional game of non-competitive chess than you postulate. I think the 6 million might be - those who roughly know the Laws.

The S&BCB post to which Roger refers provides links to the YouGov survey results for several demographics. For the UK, from a sample size of 4,161 adults (age 18 and above):
- 2% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a week;
- 3% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a month (but not as often as once a week);
- 7% said they played chess, either against a person or computer, at least once a year (but not as often as once a month).

Given that the UK adult population is about 50 million and 12% of that is about 6 million...

That's basically right. Although my feeling is, like Stewart's, that the UK may hold six million people who actually know how to play, the figure of six million who play at keast once a year can be derived from the actual data. Now obviously you'd want to know how representative the sample was, you'd want to see more surveys and research etc, but it's not actually an illegitimate figure even if it seems extremely high.

But we also know that the world figure of 600+ million is illegitimiate, that it cannot be properly derived from the data, that it appears nowhere in the original research and that it was used without consultation with the researchers. No explanation has been given of where it comes from, and at this stage we can only conclude that no such explanation exists.

I agree with all of this.

It's a poor show that The Times should repeat the 600+ million figure (and in a leader piece) without knowing how it's derived and given that it's obviously questionable (600 million is about one in twelve of the world's population as well as 100 times the figure given for the UK; can it really be that there are so many chess players?).

[David Robertson]

Vladimir Putin awarded GM title