Shrinking club chess and mergers

[David Gostelow]

Hi I was wondering how other clubs are doing , numbers of players are from my observation slowly declining, while this has been happening for years, I think its accelerating because of the average club player age getting towards the pensioner zone. The majority of players came into chess as a result of the 72 Fischer boom and are now getting to an age where some of the older ones are either dying or in poor health and thus no longer playing.

I play for 2 clubs, In Shropshire we have already merged 2 clubs , but with one player dying and another no longer playing due to health issue , key players mean that we are likley to get demoted from the first division for the first time . I can see further mergers happening. The odd player in the smaller club makes all the differance

In the Birmingham League we seem to be doing OK but this is largley a result of a decent venue and being one of the bigger clubs I think we are gathering the odd player coming into the area and the odd player from other clubs. No juniors

The general result is less clubs and leagues with the bigger clubs having multiple teams in the same league . South Birmingham being the major example in the Birmingham League with 5 teams in the top 2 leagues . It was never like this years ago and its an unfortunate but inevitable consequene IMO

Intereting to see how its going in other areas

[Joey Stewart]

Small clubs are certainly in decline, largely due to the rises in accommodation and fuel prices and when they do lose their premises and have to merge there is an inevitable loss of players long the way.

Also, chess clubs tend to rely on a small number of people doing the majority of the work and once those go then it often spells doom for the rest of their players.

[Peter D Williams]

Hi I was wondering how other clubs are doing , numbers of players are from my observation slowly declining, while this has been happening for years, I think its accelerating because of the average club player age getting towards the pensioner zone. The majority of players came into chess as a result of the 72 Fischer boom and are now getting to an age where some of the older ones are either dying or in poor health and thus no longer playing.

I play for 2 clubs, In Shropshire we have already merged 2 clubs , but with one player dying and another no longer playing due to health issue , key players mean that we are likley to get demoted from the first division for the first time . I can see further mergers happening. The odd player in the smaller club makes all the differance

In the Birmingham League we seem to be doing OK but this is largley a result of a decent venue and being one of the bigger clubs I think we are gathering the odd player coming into the area and the odd player from other clubs. No juniors

The general result is less clubs and leagues with the bigger clubs having multiple teams in the same league . South Birmingham being the major example in the Birmingham League with 5 teams in the top 2 leagues . It was never like this years ago and its an unfortunate but inevitable consequene IMO

Intereting to see how its going in other areas

Maybe you need to find ways to encourage juniors to join your chess club have you thought of contacting schools or the local scout clubs where you could pop along and give a talk on chess and hopefully recruit some new blood.

Right its time for lunch and today its a lamb sandwich

[Alex Holowczak]

The Birmingham League has been fairly steady in terms of the number of teams playing in it in recent years.

Ever since the league dropped (quite quickly) to 76 teams by 2006-07, but has oscillated between 74 and 76 ever since.

[Jonathan Rogers]

Right its time for lunch and today its a lamb sandwich

Sounds quite disgusting. I wasn't going to tell everyone but I have some foie gras left over from my trip to Paris

[Peter D Williams]

Sounds quite disgusting. I wasn't going to tell everyone but I have some foie gras left over from my trip to Paris

Do you not like English free range lamb?

Foie gras (Listeni/ˌfwɑːˈɡrɑː/, French for "fat liver") is a food product made of the liver of a duck or goose that has been specially fattened. By French law,[1] foie gras is defined as the liver of a duck or goose fattened by force-feeding corn with a gavage, although outside of France it is occasionally produced using natural feeding.[2]

i leave members on here to decide which is worse free range lamb or foie gras?

i be back tomorrow to see what progress we made on here

[David Gilbert]

i leave members on here to decide which is worse free range lamb or foie gras?

To misquote Joe Namath and (some others since) “Don’t know, I've never smoked free range lamb!”

[Paul Habershon]

With twelve teams representing just five clubs the Bedfordshire League is down to two divisions of six, just ten matches a season for each team. This includes one team from Northampton (outside the county). There certainly used to be three, if not four, larger divisions.

I think the main explanation is internet chess. I must admit that I never attend my club for skittles games, only for matches and club championship games.

The league used to contain several works teams with their subsidised premises and bars, e.g. Vauxhall Luton, Vauxhall Dunstable, Texas Instruments, 3M, Electrolux etc. but these have all disappeared, presumably for lack of organisers, players or funding. Some were useful venues for county matches. The one remaining connection is that Luton Chess Club meets at the Kent Instruments Social Club.

There is also much less chess going on in local schools and even if keen youngsters do emerge they must have problems with the seemingly increased pressure of homework/coursework clashing with the late finishes typical of weekday evening club chess.

These things inevitably go in phases. Currently the 4NCL is thriving and club chess is mostly declining. Nothing to worry about. The tide will either turn or it won't.

[MartinCarpenter]

Its county chess which is really getting savaged by the 4NCL.

The Yorkshire league has been relatively steady size wise for the ~decade I've been playing in it seriously. If anything slightly up in strength terms in recent times in the top division. That's down to a fair few strong players who have come back into the game relatively recently.

It isn't at peak size - apparently it was 10 boards not 8 for a good while etc. The bottom division, and especially a few of the teams in it, is perhaps a bit precarious. With the league being city based there have always been multiple teams from the bigger cities in the various divisions.

The Cleveland/Durham leagues have been having rather a shaky time of things in terms of teams withdrawing just recently.

[Andrew Zigmond]

The Yorkshire League had a bad collapse in the early years of the century. In 2000 there were four viable divisions; within the space of a few years we dropped to three and at one point it looked as if the third division was dwindling. Since then things have stabilised and if anything there has been a slight increase in recent years. However it has been mentioned before that this increase is due to the boom in school and university chess in the late 60s, early 70s - that generation are now nearing retirement and taking up chess as a hobby.

The brutal truth is that players on the circuit in their twenties and thirties are a dying breed. I have pointed this out countless times on this forum; the response from some quarters has been `crisis what crisis`.

Some clubs are not interested in future planning, others are hampered by limited resources and a lack of funds to invest. However recent innovations; I'm thinking of Andrew Wainwright's Bradford Knights Academy locally and Malcolm Pein's ventures nationally; show how rapidly initiatives can bear fruit if properly and professionally managed - the latter p word is something even some great servants of the game in this country seem allergic to.

If I was to make a general observation there does seem to be a failure of networking. Clubs do not communicate to share best practice and some junior organisers are reluctant to engage their students with the adult chess world.

[Matt Mackenzie]

I have said before that if even a small number of those playing chess online could somehow be encouraged to join chess clubs, much of what has been described above could be avoided or at least mitigated. Have there been any serious attempts to do this?

[stevencarr]

After a 12 year gap of playing in congresses, I was astonished how old everybody (including me!) was.

Almost everybody, of course. There was Joe McPhilips who was young, and .... Well, there must have been somebody else, surely.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I have said before that if even a small number of those playing chess online could somehow be encouraged to join chess clubs, much of what has been described above could be avoided or at least mitigated. Have there been any serious attempts to do this?

Has anyone ever tried to set up a club night that combines playing online with OTB play and socialising? The sort of set-up I'm envisaging would have various internet connected devices being used to play chess online, and boards set up on tables for analysis and games as well. There would need to be clear boundaries set when league or graded games were being played - you might need separate rooms or club nights. Such a set-up might backfire, though, with club players not previously playing on the internet switching to that and not coming to the club any more!

[Graham Borrowdale]

With twelve teams representing just five clubs the Bedfordshire League is down to two divisions of six, just ten matches a season for each team. This includes one team from Northampton (outside the county). There certainly used to be three, if not four, larger divisions.

Paul, let's not forget that five of those teams come from the Milton Keynes club, which is situated in Buckinghamshire. I think its fair to say that league chess in this particular backwater of the country is barely viable.

Not sure the internet is to blame - I think if anybody reaches a good standard just playing online, they will then want to join the outside world.

I would put the decline more down to lack of opportunities to play in secondary schools, alongside the ever increasing pressures teenagers have at school now. And if people are not playing chess as teenagers there is very little chance they will ever play.

[JustinHadi]

With Carlsen's victory in the World Championship I would suggest there would be another boom which can only be a good thing for small clubs.