Seven million watched chess event on web
Sep 23 2008 by Laura Sharpe, Liverpool Daily Post
MORE than 7m people a day watched Liverpool over the internet during the 4th European Open Championships held in the city.
The tournament at the city’s World Museum attracted record internet viewing figures, with 65m web visits for the whole tournament.
Website hits smashed the old record of 5m a day, recording a 250% increase on last year.
Professor David Robertson, principal organiser, said: “It’s difficult to imagine a better or more cost-effective way of reaching such a colossal worldwide audience.
“Liverpool has put itself right on the map for high skills and quality performance with recent chess tournaments. Our legacy must be to build on this success.”
Touted as Britain’s strongest ever tournament, the week ended in victory for the 24-year-old Dutch grandmaster, Jan Werle.
He pipped English grandmasters Nigel Short and Mickey Adams, to become European Champion.
Werle, a law student at Groningen University, beat off the challenge of 150 top players including dozens of national champions to win this prestigious title.
He said: “The players have had a wonderful time in Liverpool. We could not have been made more welcome.
“To win the championship against a field of this quality is the high point of my career. I’m absolutely overjoyed”.
Prof Robertson, who was also a prizewinner at the event, said: “Jan Werle is a true champion. Fortune favours the brave.
“He played high quality fighting chess, and deserved to triumph.”
It follows hugely popular events in Liverpool in 2006 and 2007, including 2007’s Great Britain v China match.
Earlier this year, more than 1,000 people took part in the British Championships, in St George’s Hall.
laurasharpe
Source: http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/
hits are not visitors. this number is grossly exaggerated.
Yes. I think is overly exagerated. On ICC, there are normally like 300 observers for an important game. I suppose chessbase is larger, but I would doubt there were more than 2,000. And I really doubt their website had really so many visitors. In fact, I would bet they don’t have the hardware infrastructure to support a load like that.
I’d be very interested to know if the 7 million is “hits” or “unique vistors”. If the former, what counted as a “hit”—if the screen refreshed to show a new move, was that recorded as a URL addressing and hence a “hit”?
The most I’ve seen on PlayChess (run by ChessBase) at once is 5000+ following a world championship game—if I recall right they claimed 7000+ unique visitors during the course of the game.
I’m not surprised that a free site has much higher following—people have to pay for ICC and PlayChess. Indeed, when I follow games from my office (hey—it’s not fantasy football:-) I don’t have access to the software for either, so I follow on the official site and/or dance between here and ChessPro.ru or ChessDom.
To repeat, as a computer scientist I’d be really interested to get the number of unique visitors. However sliced, I thought the “7m” was fantastic news!