Prizes Then And Now

[Andrew Zigmond]

. And why are people not doing it? They scarcely need the ECF, whether or not it is run by a `rag bag` or (as I prefer) hard working, passionate volunteers.

There are very few people active in UK chess organization with the skill sets to know how to attract and keep sponsors, and only one with any sort of track record for this on the ECF Management Board (Malcolm Pein) if the ECF itself were to want sponsorship. In fact a case can even be made that the Board is likely to repel sponsors, especially in light of the recent troubles. So we're back to the 'rag bag of amateurs' being the problem, and most definitely not being any kind of solution.

Of course a sponsorship deal does not automatically make an event happen. You still need people to actually run the event, make sure everything is set up ready and working and of course act as officials while the games are in progress (the latter of which does require a qualification). So you either pay these people money for their services - in which case you have the right to demand certain standards in return, or you expect people to do it for free.

I have long said that I would personally favour devolving the three key directorates (international, home, junior) so that the directors can enjoy a degree of autonomy and in the case of international, allow titled and professional players to develop events suitable for them and seek sponsorship without county and league officials sticking their oar in. I agree that many people on the board do not have a record in dealing in sponsors but what they DO have is a record in helping to deliver well managed events that put on a professional front (there is a big difference between amateurs and amateurism). To me the problem with the ECF is that when people who (supposedly in some cases) have a professional background try to get involved they barge in and treat existing officials with contempt or as if they are disposable while often failing to put on a professional front themselves (the evidence in the most recent case is in the public domain).

(edit - minor typing error corrected)

[Andrew Martin]

Justin's point that internet chess in all forms translates into greater interest and possibly more players is key. Do they play in tournaments though? The declining prize funds would suggest not.

I am very happy to be convinced otherwise.

I'd be interested to find out whether the decline in prizes and maybe sponsors is reflected across the chess world, particularly in European countries such as Germany, France, Spain and the USA, all of which seem to have better conditions for professional players than the UK.

[Roger de Coverly]

Justin's point that internet chess in all forms translates into greater interest and possibly more players is key.

Internet chess organisations of which there are many have mostly shown little interest in working with national or international chess bodies. Or is it the other way round? FIDE's own venture into this does not show evidence of any large numbers being involved, so they must be elsewhere.

The FIDE President and others are quite happy to trot out the dubious estimate of 600 million chess players worldwide, as if it's a scientific fact, but no one seems to be making an attempt to do an exact count, which has to exist for any organisation running a rating or grading system or for that matter like the Basman Challenge keeping a count of unique entrants.

[Tim Harding]

Steve Giddins has reminded me that it was quite common for tournaments to have prizes of £500 in the 1970s and 80s and that John Nunn combined his research fellowship with winning the Grand Prix.

The risk reward ratio was certainly pretty good then, especially when you consider that travel hotels and entry fees were much lower...

It is misleading to lump the 1970s and 1980s together. There were two huge bursts of inflation in the mid-1970s due chiefly to the formation of the OPEC cartel which greatly raised the price of crude oil and consequently of anything else.

I doubt if any single British tournament pre-1974 (except perhaps the Championship?) had a first prize of £500+. To win the Grand Prix you would have to win a lot of smaller tournaments with smaller prizes.

However the purchasing power of these small prizes was indeed quite impressive if you feed some figures into the calculator at http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare ... evalue.php

Early in 1972 I won a mid-sized five-round weekender in Caerphilly, south Wales, where the first prize was £50. That was worth over £500 nowadays according to the RPI. There were a couple of Welsh internationals in that event but no really big names as I recall.

At Easter 1973 the 7-round Hammersmith Open was the major holiday weekender in England and BCM May 1973 pages 199-200 has a report. There were 200 players in the Open and 380 total in the various sections.
Nowadays it would have been FIDE-rated but no such luck in those days. With some luck (in the pairings, rather than the play) I managed to share first and my reward according to BCM was £85.

So I guess first prize was £100 and second prize £70, a long way short of the £500 mentioned above.

Several top London-based players who later became GMs were in the field (Mestel, Speelman, Povah at least) and of those only Mestel won anything (£20 according to BCM) which he earned because he had to play co-winner Bojan Kurajica in the last round whereas I missed the GM and played Povah. (I had drawn with Mestel in round 4). Two other players also scored 6/7 and won £20 each, worth £216+ today.
According to the measuringworth calculation, £85 was equivalent to £918 in 2014 on the RPI index, so it was a substantial prize but nothing like the figures indicated in some earlier postings in this thread.

[Nigel_Davies]

Sponsorship, in the truest sense, is about demonstrating to a company that there is a substantial return on investment to be had. I was able to do that for the British Championships in Aberystwyth, securing a five figure sponsorship deal in the process, but chess in the UK has very few opportunities for this. Apart from the British Championships I'd say only the London Chess Classic, 4NCL and UK Chess Challenge have the reach required. e2e4 can and do do this on an event by event basis, but I once calculated the value of independently sponsoring all e2e4 events for a year. It was about £1000 and even then, only (I suspect) to the right company.

It is worth considering how good you need to be at other sports to make a living from playing it. Tennis requires no less skill, dedication and effort to reach the top than chess does. Greg Rusedski reckoned you needed to be top 100 in tennis to earn a living from playing and even then your career is much shorter than a chess player. Remember too that tennis players have to pay all their own expenses from prize money. Putting that into perspective, the 100th best chess player in the world is rated 2650. The 1000th best player in the world (yes, one thousand) is rated 2500. Who is the 1000th ranked tennis player in the world?

I think the idea that prize money is the source of the problem misses the point.

I've heard these arguments before and I don't think they present the full picture. Sponsorship is not just about 'exposure', the reasons can be subtle. Chess has, traditionally, punched well above its weight in terms of sponsorship, probably because its image used to be so good that companies liked being associated with it.

There's also the personal angle of having people in key positions being chess players, for example Lloyds Bank's lengthty involvement with UK chess was largely because Sir Jeremy Morse was a problemist. Jim Slater wanted to see the Fischer - Spassky match go ahead and then supported British chess as an afterthought. Then when I was involved with the Owens Corning/Wrexham Council sponsorship of the Owens Corning International it was more a community relations thing.

Of course none of this will happen if the people giving the money (for whatever the reason) feel that they might be associated with some kind of disaster.

Meanwhile my main point was to show a relationship between players coming through and the amount of money around. There's probably a case for a separate sponsorship thread given the interest in the matter.

[Leonard Barden]

Lloyds Bank's lengthty involvement with UK chess was largely because Sir Jeremy Morse was a problemist.

Jim Slater wanted to see the Fischer - Spassky match go ahead and then supported British chess as an afterthought.

1 Not so. Pat Bowman, the sponsorship manager, had a son who was a keen player and that triggered his interest. Pat still made it clear that chess was competing for the bank's limited sponsorship budget with other recipients, eg a symphony orchestra, and Sir Jeremy also told him that chess had to be considered on its own merit.
In the event, the inaugural Lloyds Bank event, Karpov's clock simul against juniors, made the front page of three broadsheets while the total annual Lloyds Bank press mentions for chess dwarfed all the other bank sponsorship publicity activities put together. I used to spend several days each year collecting cuttings of up to 800 press mentions (press cutting agencies were useless) before handing them to Pat.
It not until the 1990s, when Pat and his aide Grace Waterman had retired and the new young sponsorship manager was only interested in getting Lloyds Bank on TV, that chess got the axe.
2 Quite untrue, the reverse was the case. Jim sponsored the Slater Young Masters in 1968 and backed the winner, Ray Keene, until he became an IM. In 1971 Slater agreed to co-sponsor the 1973 World Junior as it was the only way England could have two players (Miles and Stean won silver and bronze). He also sponsored Hastings from 1971. When Keene became an IM he asked for further support to become a GM but Slater told me he would rather go for younger players with better prospects. This led to special priority for Miles, Stean, Nunn, Mestel and Speelman and to an enlarged 16-player Hastings. After Reykjavik the programme developed still further with the Slater GM awards and junior invitation events, and continued until Lloyds Bank arrived, when Jim told me "I always say that when the banks buy, it's time for me to sell".

[Nigel_Davies]

1 Not so. Pat Bowman, the sponsorship manager, had a son who was a keen player and that triggered his interest. Pat still made it clear that chess was competing for the bank's limited sponsorship budget with other recipients, eg a symphony orchestra, and Sir Jeremy also told him that chess had to be considered on its own merit.
In the event, the inaugural Lloyds Bank event, Karpov's clock simul against juniors, made the front page of three broadsheets while the total annual Lloyds Bank press mentions for chess dwarfed all the other bank sponsorship publicity activities put together. I used to spend several days each year collecting cuttings of up to 800 press mentions (press cutting agencies were useless) before handing them to Pat.
It not until the 1990s, when Pat and his aide Grace Waterman had retired and the new young sponsorship manager was only interested in getting Lloyds Bank on TV, that chess got the axe.
2 Quite untrue, the reverse was the case. Jim sponsored the Slater Young Masters in 1968 and backed the winner, Ray Keene, until he became an IM. In 1971 Slater agreed to co-sponsor the 1973 World Junior as it was the only way England could have two players (Miles and Stean won silver and bronze). He also sponsored Hastings from 1971. When Keene became an IM he asked for further support to become a GM but Slater told me he would rather go for younger players with better prospects. This led to special priority for Miles, Stean, Nunn, Mestel and Speelman and to an enlarged 16-player Hastings. After Reykjavik the programme developed still further with the Slater GM awards and junior invitation events, and continued until Lloyds Bank arrived, when Jim told me "I always say that when the banks buy, it's time for me to sell".

I think these insights are invaluable and we could do with more of the same on a separate sponsorship thread. Stewart Reuben will also have much to contribute I feel.

[Richard Bates]

The (perhaps simplistic) conclusion i would make is that it is well worth targeting companies where key individuals have some level of interest in chess, but ultimately sponsorship will only come about, and importantly (and often overlooked), <i>sustained</i> with a hell of a lot of hard work to demonstrate that the sponsor can, will and is getting value for their investment. Especially in the case of public companies. And perhaps a problem is that most chessplayers have forgotten that (if they ever knew it). Once a genuine, as opposed to philanthropic, sponsorship deal has been secured the work has barely begun.

[Mick Norris]

The 1000th best player in the world (yes, one thousand) is rated 2500. Who is the 1000th ranked tennis player in the world?

I think the idea that prize money is the source of the problem misses the point.

The 1000th rated male tennis player is a 17 year old Italian who has won $2,377 prize money this year, boosting his career earnings to $3,801 - net of costs, he'll be paying to play, presumably in the hope that he'll get better and make it to big money, or at least a living

The 999th is a 27 year old Swede who has won $1,000 this year, and $83,295 in his career - I can't believe he will ever making a living playing tennis

So yes, chess not different in that respect

[Nigel_Davies]

The 1000th best player in the world (yes, one thousand) is rated 2500. Who is the 1000th ranked tennis player in the world?

I think the idea that prize money is the source of the problem misses the point.

The 1000th rated male tennis player is a 17 year old Italian who has won $2,377 prize money this year, boosting his career earnings to $3,801 - net of costs, he'll be paying to play, presumably in the hope that he'll get better and make it to big money, or at least a living

The 999th is a 27 year old Swede who has won $1,000 this year, and $83,295 in his career - I can't believe he will ever making a living playing tennis

So yes, chess not different in that respect

Sorry but these numbers are rubbish.

You've only used WTA events to come up with these numbers and not the other tours. There are plenty of other events around , for example you can find details of the Aegon British Tour here:

http://www.lta.org.uk/competitions/adul ... tish-tour/

[Mick Norris]

British Tennis Tour.

(1) The entry fee is £21, perhaps slightly cheaper than a traditional weekender.
(2) The duration of the event is 5-6 days, longer than all weekenders that I know of.
(3) The prize for the winner is £1,000 for the winner of a Premier event (of which there were only 3 in 2015), £500 for Tier 1 and £200 for tier 2 (the majority of the events are Tier 2). Prize money goes down to the Quarter Finals only, so 24 players go home with nothing.

So the costs of being at these events are higher than a British weekender, and the prizes are comparable with a British weekender.

[Nigel_Davies]

British Tennis Tour.

(1) The entry fee is £21, perhaps slightly cheaper than a traditional weekender.
(2) The duration of the event is 5-6 days, longer than all weekenders that I know of.
(3) The prize for the winner is £1,000 for the winner of a Premier event (of which there were only 3 in 2015), £500 for Tier 1 and £200 for tier 2 (the majority of the events are Tier 2). Prize money goes down to the Quarter Finals only, so 24 players go home with nothing.

So the costs of being at these events are higher than a British weekender, and the prizes are comparable with a British weekender.

To be sure we'd have to see the annual accounts of the 1000+ tennis players. My guess is that they earn far more than chess players with a similar ranking, basically because the tennis fraternity spend more on their hobby in general (club membership fees are way higher, then there's all the gear). Of course they probably have to supplement their income with coaching and stuff.

[Andrew Zigmond]

And tennis has a considerable number of non playing fans; a demographic virtually non existent in chess.

[Mick Norris]

British Tennis Tour.

(1) The entry fee is £21, perhaps slightly cheaper than a traditional weekender.
(2) The duration of the event is 5-6 days, longer than all weekenders that I know of.
(3) The prize for the winner is £1,000 for the winner of a Premier event (of which there were only 3 in 2015), £500 for Tier 1 and £200 for tier 2 (the majority of the events are Tier 2). Prize money goes down to the Quarter Finals only, so 24 players go home with nothing.

So the costs of being at these events are higher than a British weekender, and the prizes are comparable with a British weekender.

To be sure we'd have to see the annual accounts of the 1000+ tennis players. My guess is that they earn far more than chess players with a similar ranking, basically because the tennis fraternity spend more on their hobby in general (club membership fees are way higher, then there's all the gear). Of course they probably have to supplement their income with coaching and stuff.

Well, that's a guess not evidence

Tennis is a more expensive game to play than chess for the same reasons, and if the tournaments are longer, the accommodation expenses are higher - it isn't income, but net profit that matters, and I guess like Sean that there's no way for tennis players at that level to make a living

To move away from guess work, the comments of British tennis players giving up playing full time, of which I have read many over the years, indicate that outside the top 100 in the World, without LTA support they can't make the numbers add up

Anyway, this is off topic now

[Nigel_Davies]

Anyway, returning to the central point of this thread, if the UK wants professionals coming through to compete with those from other countries, there needs to be a way of making a living. And doing that by coaching and then going off to play won't work, you need to play full time to be a real player.

BTW, I should address the totally bogus argument that 'GMs are playing for crap conditions and prizes now so that it must be OK, and that's all they should expect anyway'. The UK had a large number of GMs coming through on the back of the Fischer boom, a lot of them have quit playing whilst a few have continued fighting it out in an ever diminishing pool of money.

Thinking this is OK, without investing in the future, will mean the market value will continue to go down whilst putting most sensible chess playing kids off the idea of doing chess instead of becoming an accountant or similar. And to think that a David Howell will appear out of a vacuum is also mistaken, promising players need to play against seasoned opposition in order to develop. So basically you need a fair number of professional, semi-pro and other strong players around. And that doesn't mean that they're going to go off and play for peanuts week in and week out. It means prize money.