The North South Divide (?)

[AustinElliott]

Andy Horton, Joe McPhillips and Michael Fernandez are Greater Manchester players and thus MCCU

To be fair, it's quite easy to forget that Manchester is not in the North.
It does tend to increase the Southern bias.

Perhaps we should be clear that 'North South Divide' in the UK is in essence a shorthand for "London and the South East' vs "Everywhere Else (Mostly Northward and Westward'.

Having been born and raised in the SE, but lived in Manchester for the last quarter of a century, it is clear to me that

(i) people in Manchester self-identify as 'Northerners' and not 'from the Midlands'

(ii) Mancunians (of all social classes save the poshest green-wellie rural Tatton-ites) tend to feel strongly that London and the SE only has eyes / concern for London and the SE. In all fields, that is, from politics to media to education to.... etc.

As I've often joked, if Scotland votes for independence there would be plenty in Manchester (and the rest of the "North") who would be tempted to join them, rather than stay as a poor province ruled from London.

[Neill Cooper]

I've now looked through the Top English U18 players on the ECF grading database http://www.englishchess.org.uk/grading/database/
It lists 120 players who are graded 156 and above, aged from 17 down to 9.

86 are listed for South East teams, 32 for other English teams and two for elsewhere (Scotland and Gibraltar).

It looks like there is a clear North/South divide in our top junior players.

For information the counties I considered South East were:
Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridge, Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Middlesex, Norfolk, Northants, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex.

[Andrew Zigmond]

So I think we've agreed that there is a North/ South divide.

Next question - what are we going to do about it?

[MartinCarpenter]

Well firstly you've got to establish whether its a temporary effect from early coaching producing earlier improvement in the SE players - the spread of adults looks much more even so this isn't obvious. If it is that then it really doesn't mean terribly much as people do seem to more or less catch up later.

Look at Oskar say - 141 at 14, 199 now. Clearly if you'd caught/trained him hard earlier he'd have been stronger earlier but would there have been any long term effect?

In fact even if there are some long term effects, then you have to ask how much they mean. For instance turning some lifetime ~180's into ~200's isn't a hugely weighty matter. Actually, with how things are now you could even wonder how much C/FM <-> IM conversion really matters. You could even (dubiously?) argue that leaving people some relatively easy headroom to improve later might help keep them playing.

Of course the long term health of the population/playing base really does matter, so if there are big differences in numbers then you could/should be asking what they're doing and if we can bring it over. I'd start by doing that with 3C's first though

[Neill Cooper]

So I think we've agreed that there is a North/ South divide.

Next question - what are we going to do about it?

There is greater junior chess activity, at all ability levels and ages, in the South East because there are more people (chess players, parents, school teachers) willing to give up time to run it.

[MartinCarpenter]

Is that actually demonstrated? Greater coached junior chess activity yes, which could well make for more net activity and clearly affects who should get into UK junior squads. The two certainly aren't directly equivalent though.

[Neill Cooper]

Here is a breakdown of the top 120 juniors by county of the first club listed against them on the ECF database:

Surrey 16
Middlesex 13
Sussex 11
Lancashire 11
Kent 10
Berkshire 7
Hertfordshire 6
Oxfordshire 5
Yorkshire 5
Cambridge 4
Essex 4
Nottinghamshire 3
Devon 3
Cheshire 3
Suffolk 2
Buckinghamshire 2
Northumberland 2
Worcestershire 2
Gloucestershire 2
Wiltshire 1
Northants 1
Leicestershire 1
Staffordshire 1
Warwickshire 1
Hampshire 1

[PeterFarr]

No Greater Manchester?

[Neill Cooper]

Since we are talking about geography I have used Mike Basman's list of the historic counties. http://www.ukchesschallenge.com/english_counties.shtml

[PeterFarr]

yes, works for most of the country of course but....

[Philip Adams]

Chess in the North West has a long (Liverpool Chess Club founded 1837, Manchester League founded in 1890) and fairly distinguished (GM Blackburne to GM Gordon, via among others, Burn, Abrahams, the Littlewoods, Markland, Corden, Horner, Pein, Davies, Short, Norwood...) past, but I am not sanguine about its future.

In Greater Manchester (I can't speak for Lancashire, Cheshire or Merseyside) it seems to me that rhe main challenges regarding juniors are:
1) the moribund state of school league chess (which was very healthy here in the 1960s and 70s);
2) largely misguided parental concern that time and effort spent on chess might detract from academic success;
3) the shortage of even 'passively' junior-friendly chess clubs;
4) the shortage of clubs that actively encourage juniors to join (there are exceptions, e.g. Ashton, Bolton, Worsley);
5) the seeming reluctance on the part of other MCF clubs (some of which are on their last legs) to accept that the successful experience of the 3Cs junior club (founded in 1979 and since then many times champions of the Manchester [adult] League) might hold any lessons for them.

Of the MGS squad that have won the National Schools for the last three years, five have been coached at 3Cs on a regular basis for the last few years (Andy Horton 209, Jamie Horton 188, Daniel Abbas 181, Jacob Manton 175, Jason Lau 177. (The Fernandez brothers from Singapore play for another MCF club, Marple.) The school itself does little or nothing to help, except perhaps pay the competition entry fee and transport.

The last state school from the Greater Manchester area to do well in the National Schools was the Blue Coat School, Oldham, which did well a few times but never quite managed to win it - best result: runners-up in 2004-5. Their team was also based on (and even largely organised by) 3Cs, and was led by the future GM Stephen Gordon.

[Neill Cooper]

The is a close relationship between the number of UKCC entrants in a county and the number of top 120 players they have, as shown in the scatter diagram below. The correlation coefficient is 0.89, though "correlation does not imply causality".

[IM Jack Rudd]

The is a close relationship between the number of UKCC entrants in a county and the number of top 120 players they have, as shown in the scatter diagram below. The correlation coefficient is 0.89, though "correlation does not imply causality".

And one reason for this is extremely obvious: the counties at the top of your top 120 list are all ones with very high populations. What happens if you plot UKCC entrants/population against top 120/population?

[Neill Cooper]

Graph weighted by population of the county given below. Still a good correlation (0.70) though a few small counties have relatively large numbers of entries but no top 120 players.

[Neill Cooper]

The data in the above graph, with counties named, are given below.

Code: Select all

Traditional         Top Players         UKCC entrants
County              per million          per million
Oxfordshire             10.2                2511
Cambridge               10.1                2047
Berkshire                7.6                1523
Sussex                   7.4                1757
Hertfordshire            5.8                1436
Surrey                   5.8                2246
Kent                     3.9                1058
Middlesex                3.8                1739
Suffolk                  3.0                1144
Nottinghamshire          3.0                1152
Buckinghamshire          2.9                1356
Devon                    2.8                 949
Northumberland           2.6                1092
Worcestershire           2.4                1239
Lancashire               2.2                 786
Cheshire                 1.9                 901
Gloucestershire          1.7                1323
Wiltshire                1.6                1468
Essex                    1.5                 932
Northants                1.3                 897
Leicestershire           1.1                1113
Yorkshire                1.0                 688
Staffordshire            0.5                 511
Warwickshire             0.5                 708
Hampshire                0.5                 975

The North-South divide is again clear.