"irvin" wrote in message
...
True, Paul. Mike's was just a bad analogy.

Mike made an excellent point.
Long before poker was on TV,
professional poker players made
a good living by beating amateurs
who thought they were good. This
is a revenue stream that barely exists
in chess.

Chess is just something people don't fond interesting, largely
because they
don't understand it. A good analogy would be a math competition. How
many
people would find advance math competitions interesting? Very few, I
guess.

Yet Go is harder to understand
than chess but has a bigger
following. Poker has a following
big enough that it assuredly includes
many terrible players. In fact,
"celebrity poker" proves that even
terribly played poker can find
an audience.

My guess is that the level of
understanding required to
appreciate chess at the game
level as a fan is pretty low -
1000 ELO or so. The problem
is that the chess world has
been too arrogant/clueless
to evaluate the appeal of its
product and make appropriate
changes.

Something worth pointing out:

In any park where chess is being played, the blitz games are the
only ones
that attract spectators. I'll let others interpret that any way they
want...

The obvious interpretation is that
games at slower time controls
don't have sufficient drama to
warrant the time investment for
real time spectatorship. That's what
editing is for.

DK