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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"?
I threw out the idea of Larry starting up a server without giving it great thought... yes, I knew there was lots of servers, but I thought Larry might come up with something special that could set his apart from the rest. Cost I am not aware of, but I (and perhaps Larry) can dream... :) [edit: at least Larry might keep track of where his server users are located, so as to promote Canadian chess with stats about Canadian server users later on]
[edit: does FICS number of users indicate which countries (i.e. whether North American/Canadian) users are from?]
Other than international games, soccer has trouble getting on TV in Canada afaik, and there are millions of Canadian kids who play (at least I think I recall hearing). On the other hand, late one night I saw backgammon being played on TV using a chess clock, though I suppose it was a rare appearance for that game.
[edit: I guess the number of soccer kids, at least registered ones, is not in the millions:
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.
Playchess.com does this. They show a display of where everyone is from and the distance from you in kilometers.
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):
Another search I did with Google indicated that for poker, by comparison, there are 60+ million players in the US (and 100+ million worldwide). My first link above indicated that there were 45 million chess players in the US in 2004. Interesting.
Last edited by Kevin Pacey; Wednesday, 9th May, 2012, 09:09 AM.
Reason: Spelling
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Murphy's law, by Edward A. Murphy Jr., USAF, Aerospace Engineer
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.
Another idea authors of opening or repertoire advice books in particular could use is to try to be helpful in an original way when it comes to readers selecting a repertoire. I can suggest a method which need not necessarily be the basis for an entire book, and might also be used to help create an online self-help survey method for chessplayers. There have been previous attempts at such a method by various authors, but none have tried to be particularly thorough.
A sort of self-survey method that I once used to verify whether I should like my current repertoire, i.e. whether to add/subtract/replace my current openings openings, is to try to quantify openings in terms of criteria I selected to represent my style, which I could rate of equal importance, or weight some criteria more than others. I weighted my past results, or having experience with an opening, slightly more than all the other (otherwise equally weighted) criteria I used.
The criteria I used were based partly on conventional words of advice from opening/repertoire advice I had read. After I scored a given opening for Black (of all the defences that exist, except those that I ruled out automatically out of hand), using each criteria that I had a long list of, I added up that opening's total criteria score.
The Black openings that had the top criteria scores (and/or having at least a minimum score I arbitarily selected) would be among my choices for a potential repertoire. I then did something similar for my choice of White openings. I don't mind having a wide repertoire, but many players want just one or two defences with Black, and just one or two first moves with White (along with one or two variations against each major Black defence).
Over the years I used various criteria (many included in the self-survey I later came up with) in arriving at my current repertoire, or else it was arrived at at least partly by a sort of natural selection process based most heavily on past results.
My self-survey method involved such criteria as whether I could play for a win 'reliably' (according to known theory I agreed with) with at least one line vs. everything the other side might throw at me, whether I could do so with at least three such lines whether or not they were reliable, whether an opening scored a good win percentage on average in databases, whether an opening scored a good win percentage (I choose 12.5%, or 1/8, as an ideal minimum for Black) in 2600+ vs. 2600+ games, whether an opening was well respected, king safety (either that or having a counterattack/counterplay).
I also included as criteria various common pawn structures (that possibly tend to arise) which I tended to favour (or not), whether defence was required (e.g. for a pawn) without a counterattack, whether lots of memory work was required (e.g. many variations past move 20), initiative or dynamic potential often available to my side, lots of space, easy development, ability to play solidly/positionally/tactically/sharply/offbeat vs. opponent, lots of transpositional avenues available to reach a given opening. I didn't rate being down material as a criteria, as assuming my side is otherwise okay that normally doesn't phase me.
Another, special, criteria I used was how many fairly popular variations/defences I might have to face in practice. Prefering a low number (and given that I nevertheless didn't want this criteria to have equal weight to others), this criteria was scored 1/n, where n is the number of popular variations/defences I might face. This special criteria also can come in handy for breaking otherwise tied criteria scores for two or more openings.
Somewhat shockingly, and yet also pleasantly, after I painstakingly went through all existing openings/defences that I didn't reject automatically beforehand, I found that all the openings in my existing repertoire completely agreed with my top criteria scores for all unrejected openings/defences. The exercise was still useful in a practical sense, because I discovered other openings that were almost as good in terms of their criteria scores, and I could keep them in mind as the first additions or replacements to my repertoire.
Last edited by Kevin Pacey; Wednesday, 9th May, 2012, 11:41 AM.
Reason: Grammar
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Murphy's law, by Edward A. Murphy Jr., USAF, Aerospace Engineer
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