Where does he get that count from? Is it on the same scale as the 600 million worldwide, so popular with Agon and the ex FIDE president.Malcolm outlined the key points from the paper and supporting note. Malcolm said that it was critical to reach out to the millions of casual players who do not currently engage with the ECF,
By way of a hard number, the ECF grading page now discloses the total on the grading database. It's 124,558 as of writing, and that's going to have been the headcount generated during the 25 years that the BCF/ECF have had a centralised system. The count of active players is usually around the 15,000 mark which would exclude juniors who play school competitions but don't play any graded chess.