Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

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  • Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

    I challenge you guys to take a look at the NHL and the other most successful sporting organizations.

    They are private companies that dictate rule changes, regional divisions (for their sport) and so on. All their decisions are about profit and the promotion of their sport.

    The end result is their sports are huge and profitable.

    In the chess world our regionally represented not for profit org the CFC has a rule by committee feel to it and there are no benefits for those who work the hardest for it. You guys will be very lucky for example if someone as hard working and intelligent as Mr Von Keitz chooses to stay on as president after this summer. Why should he?

    By contrast take a look at the Chess and Math Association. It has a successful series of events leading to its own championship. Many of these events are attended by hundreds of kids. They also have a successful school program bringing chess to many new kids all the time. I would also add, Strategy Games has successfully provided services to chess players and tournaments for many years.

    Quite frankley you can see how a private org with a narrow focus has created a situation where some are working full time for chess providing the service thats demanded in a much more no nonsense way.

    So my question to you all is why do we have this organization just doing this for kids? Lets hand them adult chess too.

    Lets dismantle the CFC and make Larry Bevand the dictator of Canadian Chess. It will be his job to try and push the number of chess tournament players from the dismal 2000 it is now to 10k, 20k or 50k whatever he can achieve.

    Once chess is bigger you can talk about pro leagues and chess on tv or sponsorship and the discussion might actually mean something.

    He and his organizations will be entitled to whatever profits they can get along the way while doing this. And I hope they make a lot of it.

    And just like the "pro sports" what we get from the company bringing it to us is always much more than what they get from us.

  • #2
    Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

    I agree.

    Norm

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    • #3
      Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

      Let's make Larry the Bobby Bittman of Canadian chess. We can wholeheartedly celebrate his birthday. Just think, Larry: 50,000 adult chess players vying for your attention!

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

        Originally posted by Jonathan Berry View Post
        Let's make Larry the Bobby Bittman of Canadian chess. We can wholeheartedly celebrate his birthday. Just think, Larry: 50,000 adult chess players vying for your attention!
        If Larry is the Bittman of chess, I think I know who the PR man could be..

        Comment


        • #5
          Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

          It would be easier just to start a cult of Larry or a church of Larry. That way you don't need FIDE approval. http://www.chefjuke.com/burnman/fcol/index.html

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          • #6
            Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

            Originally posted by Garvin Nunes View Post
            I challenge you guys to take a look at the NHL and the other most successful sporting organizations.
            These organizations don't make the money. The teams do.
            The teams' money comes from spectators, not entrance fees.

            So chess is akin to poker, not sports. The interest in poker is because
            it is gambling (mainly on luck).

            Chess is a game mainly of skill, so gamblers are not interested.

            So chess is not a team sport, nor is it gambling. That is why there is
            no money in it.

            All the Larrys in the world cannot change that.

            Comment


            • #7
              Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

              Originally posted by Garvin Nunes View Post
              I would also add, Strategy Games has successfully provided services to chess players and tournaments for many years.
              Yes, but can you imagine them trying to flog books named
              "Think Like a Stanley Cup Contender", "Bobby Orr's Greatest
              Games" or "Learning the Left Wing Lock Defense"?

              Comment


              • #8
                Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

                Years ago, I suggested to Larry by email that I then had a similar wish to Garvin's, even whether or not the CFC survived the troubled times it was then going through. Larry politely eschewed the thought.

                Years later, Larry once posted on chesstalk that a successful CFC would actually be good for the CMA. I try to take that at face value, now that I am a Governor again.

                As Larry's arch-nemesis (sp?) K.S. once pointed out, a chess federation for a given country meets requirements much different than the CMA is able to at present. Above all, I suppose, there is the FIDE gatekeeping role that the CFC plays for Canada.

                If the constitution of the CFC were changed so that Larry, someone who afaik derives substantial income from chess-based activities, could become CFC President (perhaps for more than one year, even), then Garvin might get his wish.

                Nevertheless, it remains an open question to my mind whether the CFC should some day be run as a for-profit organization, after suitable constitutional changes.
                Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
                Murphy's law, by Edward A. Murphy Jr., USAF, Aerospace Engineer

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                • #9
                  Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

                  Democracy can be messy. Regardless I'll take it, warts and all, over any dictatorship.

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                  • #10
                    Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

                    Originally posted by Ed Zator View Post
                    Yes, but can you imagine them trying to flog books named
                    "Think Like a Stanley Cup Contender", "Bobby Orr's Greatest
                    Games" or "Learning the Left Wing Lock Defense"?
                    Rock and Sock'em Rooks, Knock About Kings, Fighting Pawns, Bitchen Bishops - if Don Cherry put out chess videos

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

                      I wonder if Larry is keeping in mind the possibility of the CMA someday operating an online paying chess server (with all sorts of bells and whistles, e.g. chess variants, to justify the 'paying' part). The CMA and the CFC might then eventually arrange some sort of a deal for CFC members to use such a CMA server.
                      Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
                      Murphy's law, by Edward A. Murphy Jr., USAF, Aerospace Engineer

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

                        Originally posted by Zeljko Kitich View Post
                        Rock and Sock'em Rooks, Knock About Kings, Fighting Pawns, Bitchen Bishops - if Don Cherry put out chess videos
                        Chess books with racy titles might be one way to increase interest in chess for the average man, however slightly.


                        Chess writing may be open to much more experimentation than has been already tried. I once briefly put 10 annotated games of mine within a link to the old (i.e. now defunct) Ottawa Chess Club message board years ago. The twist I added was that there were three different types of notes offered with each game.

                        One type of note was labelled 'Novice', another was called 'Intermediate', and the other was for 'Advanced'. For any given move of a game there could be zero, one, two or all three types of annotation, sort of like having three different annotators for a game.

                        Novice notes were what I thought were basic (e.g. simple principles or tactics), with Intermediate and Advanced notes being progressively more advanced in terms of expected understanding. I left it to the reader to decide what level of notes he should read, and naturally if he was curious he could look at more advanced (or even simpler) level notes.


                        I happened to look at poker on TV tonight, and it struck me that doing a presentation for chess on TV could be done similarly, or with possibly an even greater variety of gimmicks. As someone put it long ago, chess has no problem presenting itself on TV. It is getting airtime agreed to in North America that is the hard part. If Larry or someone else can make the arrangements, preferably by making chess more popular on this continent first, that would be great. I suspect North American internet chess playing exploding in popularity might be an intermediate step.
                        Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
                        Murphy's law, by Edward A. Murphy Jr., USAF, Aerospace Engineer

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

                          Originally posted by Kevin Pacey View Post
                          I suspect North American internet chess playing exploding in popularity might be an intermediate step.
                          A possible problem is that if internet chess playing by North Americans does ever explode, using that fact to aid promoting chess otb or on TV might be hindered if there is lack of proof that North Americans are indeed playing in droves.

                          A way around this problem could be if registering for playing on a chess server somehow involved recording approximately where a user's computer was located. I don't know if any existing chess servers do this.
                          Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
                          Murphy's law, by Edward A. Murphy Jr., USAF, Aerospace Engineer

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

                            Why go to all the expense and effort to start up another Internet chess server? (World Chess Network needed lots of capital just to keep it going.) There are dozens of them already - free and pay sites. Doesn't 300,000 members on FICS (that's just one server) denote "exploding in popularity"?

                            Here are a couple of dozen:

                            http://www.worldchesslinks.net/e0000.html

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Re: Why Larry Bevand Should Be Made Dictator Of Canadian Chess

                              Below are some claims I found using Google, which any potential chess promoter/sponsor might consider, unless more reliable/Canadian figures can be found by someone searching more thoroughly than I did.

                              The first link is basically stats on Americans that played chess at any level circa 2004. The second link is for the number of internet chess players worldwide (I have noticed one person in another search answer I saw was sceptical that the answer was 285 million, let alone 28 million):

                              http://answers.google.com/answers/th...id/752764.html

                              http://answers.google.com/answers/th...id/700236.html
                              Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
                              Murphy's law, by Edward A. Murphy Jr., USAF, Aerospace Engineer

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