It is not my idle speculation, but Mike Nolan's.

...but if we took your claims at face value, it leads you to the
conclusion
that a club that runs 45+ events per year ...must be a USCF powerhouse.

the serious question is about rated games, and in another forum I have
now received information on members with less than 10 games and those
with more.

i have asked a few more questions since those figures are 30,000 members
short of the entire membership [and who may have played no games at all],
but more people have played less than 10 than have played more than 10.

this makes their ratings provisional - and if the 30k of missing players
also have less than 10, only 25k members have non-provisional ratings. it
is also important to know that 20k members have a rating average of 500 -
especially when catering to their reading habits on chess [if any]

i think this is rather important information to understand if you were
running any sort of chess group, and is the sort of study often called
'marketing' - that is, knowledge of the habits of the customer

phil innes


Suggesting that one target one's product -- playing chess -- to those who
do not play is...to use one word...STUPID.

Having started off with his own invention of 'do not play', Eric Johnson
will presumably make a sports analogy...

It is akin to a bowling magazine targeting people who never bowl.

One interesting feature of this inquiry returned the fact that FIVE times
more people in Washington state played //rated// chess than were USCF
members.

I also think that there are more people playing on-line chess than are rated
members. If Larry Evans is correct and there are 40 million people in the
country who know the game, then this is not quite like targeting non-bowling
people, it means coming to the realisation that USCF in fact caters to less
than half of one percent of the playing community! That's what marketing is,
/looking/ at the market, actual and potential. But if you don't look you
aren't doing it.

USCF's product is tournament chess and tournament chess ratings.

Therefore it is not achieving its 'target'. Nolan affirms that less than
half adult members play even one rated game in any one year - and I pursued
that to discover that less than half of those people played more than would
for a provisional rating in any other country [more/less than 10 games].

So in fact only abt. 7,500 adult members play 10+ rated games in any one
year. That is, for better or worse, the state of USCF's union!

Semi-serious amateur tournament chess. By catering to that group...and
designing its products around that market, it provides access to that
activity to new players who never imagined it even existed.

By virtue of the lack of a national championship, and reporting only to
existing members, I must suppose that they will continue to imagine 'it'
even exists.

To dumb down its offerings would be a crime against amateur chess.

Do you suggest that local clubs spend scarce resources catering to the
whims of people who also do not play chess?

One interesting fact about Don's book was to contrast what happened to US
Chess clubs when weekend swisses arrived all over the place coupled with
introduction of the ELO system - an unintended effect, he says, was that
very many people, especially the stronger players, abandoned chess clubs and
just went to the very weekend tournaments that Eric Johnson here describes.

To quantify Johnson's argument it is necessary to understand that he is
addressing just 7,500 adults - or 0.05% of the chess playing community in
the USA, and this tiny margin is held to be central, while 99.95% are
ignored.

That is one opinion of 'marketing', whereas I intended the term as /looking/
at the estate occupied by the playing community. With minds like these who
will not even look beyond some fond and inflated memory of past-hopes,
serious chess in the USA will continue to decline like a Wagnerian melodrama
into some terminal twilight, both in absolute numbers and in playing
frequency.

If you are too frightened to look, then maybe everything you don't know will
seem stupid, no?

Phil Innes

ECJ