A few days ago, I posted the following:
Chess is one of the most popular games / sports in the world. There are over 160 member federations under FIDE. There are hundreds of millions of people playing chess worldwide. So the question is:
– How come chess is not a more commercially viable game / sport?
– How come chess is not as big as it could be with the media?
Some said that chess could not be on TV because it is boring. Is it really more exciting to watch poker, billiards, fishing or the spelling bees? Both poker and billiards are heavily edited. I do not know about the spelling bees.
I spoke to dozens of high-level professional Marketing / PR in Fortune 500 companies as well as major Marketing / PR firms about this issue. Most of them gave me a similar answer. They said that the #1 problem of chess is not the game in itself. They said that chess as a game is very marketable from multiple angles. (These are not chess people. They are Marketing and PR people for large corporations, athletes, other sports and in entertainment, etc.)
The #1 problem, they said, is ….
What do you think are the problems?
Last chance to give your opinions 🙂 I will post their answers later on today.
Oh, I’ll go for broke and say that their #1 problem is Sam Sloan, or some variation on working with the people currently in power.
With all the suspense I’m thinking the #1 answer is going to be very profound.
The #1 problem is that the people aren’t marketable. Chess players are considered “nerdy”, but not nerdy enough in an interesting (e.g. Bill Gates) sort of way.
lIts hard to make people enjoying chess game without certain level of understanding.
In other sports, like Tennis or Basketball, everybody who watched the game know which one gets the benefit if one scored, and who was leading, and how far the differences. The evaluation could be evaluated in every scored made by both of the players or teams. At brief, their scoring system is easy to be evaluated.
But I suggest that TV or internet chess show of an event will put a or two bars graph or scoring system that are easy to follow who is leading, how far the differences between both players, who will finish or sure to be win.And the fluctuation of the bar graph could be seen in every move made.
How is it done? I suggest using Fritz or any other chess program evaluation. Give each player one bar graph. If one of the player move, and Fritz assign that move increase its evaluation +0.5 let the player’s bar graph move closer to complete filling bar graph, and if the assignment was mate in X moves, the complete filling the bar graph.
If the evaluation -0.5 let it move closer to complete hollow bar graph. It also applied to the other player with the other player’s bar graph.
What we will see is a racing of two bargraphs reflecting both the players strength in the game. Even a novice chess player would eventually understand who was winning, and how good was a move made just now. How far the game would finish (because the bar graph is about to completely filled up).
Hopefully this idea will be usefull.
Besides of the usual “boring if you are not seriously into it” replies i think there is an other thing: the average TV-watcher after 8-10 hours of work wants to watch in general something brainless, where you don’t have to think. In this sense chess is tiring, needs mental work even from the kibitzer. It is hard to get this work from a tired, “just wanna relax after work” person.
You’de better watch out for these Marketing guys.
They have a tendency to tell you what you want to hear and that is not always the truth.
The #1 problem is that in order to have someone interested on chess coverage, he needs to know how to play chess or at least how to move the pieces and basic rules. Not everyone is a chess player.
If you add to that the pace of a chess game is very slow, then you have the answer: your audience will be chess players connected thorugh chess servers or web sites following an event.
That’s how it is.
What do do then?
You can’t change the pace of a game, and to really enjoy it you need to understand what is going on in a game. This is why commentators are very important for the audience. They say chess is very dynamic but this is only because the potential of the position and not the position per se. Someone has to explain and show variations to the audience. An the audience has to know some basic concepts in order to understand what the commentator is saying.
We cannot force chess to be much more marketable than it is today. Things happen naturally and chess is in the position it has been for several years from a marketing perspective.
I would like, though, that the situation could change as I truly love the game.
number one problem is the players. they need more personalities like bobby fischer. you can market a crazy lunatic but how do you market some of the robots in chess. players need to be more out spoken forget about politically correct. we need them to speak there minds. get some personality. the biggest showman in chess is topalovs trainer dainalov and he doesnt even play.
There are not any charismatic players out there in my opinion to create excitement, controversy, or intrigue except Topalov and his manager Danilov, who is despicable and not interesting.
Susan, you definitely have us on the edge of our seats!
My assumption would be that chess is not marketable partially due to the fast-paced computer age in which we live, although faster time controls could probably remedy that.
The #1 reason? Probably poor management/marketing decisions. The opportunities are there, but no one has stepped up to the plate to sieze them.
Chess is, in some ways, an elitist sport/game, and many of its practitioners are reluctant to market it to the masses in a fashion similar to other sports.
I might be way off on this, but it sounds to me like we simply need fresh, young marketing experts who see the world through the eyes of young people today.
This has less to do with the nature of the people that play chess. You have all sorts of people. There is of course the dull people in suit and tie, that does not appeal to anyone, like Kamsky, Kasimdzhanov, Gelfand and the likes. But there is also people with charm and personality that you can’t help to notice like Etienne Barcot, Loek van Wely, Magnus Carlsen, Vassily Ivanchuk and Levon Aronian, who doesn’t look like they are going to a business meeting. But rather look like “ordinary” people (and who you actually can sell on TV. And then you have the (excuse my language) “nerds” like Ponomariov, Gelfand, Malakhov and the likes, that Susan so badly want to dress up for TV or other image purposes. 🙂
I can’t see what looks have to do with this. This is not a wedding or a funeral, this is sports. And how this will help chess I really can’t see. I’d like to discuss this with you Susan, if you read this. You are mistaken. I’d rather have the guys from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” to dress up the dull guys in suit and tie, rather than trying to force everyone to look like they are going to a business meeting. That will NOT help the popularity of chess, rather the opposite.
But….
It isn’t to easy for ordinary people to see what is going on in a chessgame. I’ll give you one example.
In Morelia-Linares Magnus beat Topalov, as Topalov resigned. No one (I mean no one, except perhaps 2 or 3 GM’s, if that many) thought much of it, until Magnus explained after the match what Topalov should have done to aviod loosing.
Then the cheeky journalists (and everyone else for that matter) suddenly said how stupid Topalov was for not seing the “obvious” 6-7 moves that would have gotten him out of the problems. Stupid Topalov…
For most people “better positions” are just words, and they need accurate commentary from one of our GM’s. But even then it isn’t always easy to understand. This is no job for an ordinary journalist. Unless you got at least 2300-2400 rating and some program like Rybka or whatever to help you, you are lost in the woods…
It is also next to impossible to predict how long a match will last. It could take one hour, it could take 4. It will be very difficult to send LIVE from the matches, and one need to edit things down to perhaps a 30 minute program (or whatever, perhaps 1 hour if they sent from a big tournament with loads of participants).
Also there is the factor of who is at the top at any one time. National champions from relatively big countries like Italy and Germany don’t have any stars. You could easily throw in UK (Short and Adams ain’t that good) France (sorry Barcot) and other smaller countries from western europe as well. And of course USA, that have had one chess player, and one only, and the last decent game he played was in the 70’s. That some of the russian players that fail to impress in their home country and move to USA, Israel, Spain or whatever still doesn’t change the fact that this is a sport dominated by Russia/Eastern Europe. It is like trying to sell curling or cricket in the US. It is very hard.
Not shure if what I wrote was what you were after Susan. But even though I love chess, I see loads of reasons to why the marketing people who will pay for this rather would spend their money on other things that give them better ratings. You know who you reach when you sponsor Martha Steward/Operah Winfrey or NHL/Indy 500 (to give you understandable examples from the USA), but who is the target-group when showing chess on TV? It might do well in the news, but not much more as some company then have to put money into this to get it on the air. It is just like classical music, books, educational TV, theatre, opera or bridge for that matter. It is out there, but as long as it is demanding on your intellect, it is hard to sell to “common” people on TV.
That is why we got the internet, although I see that this means that there will be less money in chess. I guess that is the main reason for wanting it on TV?
Greetings from Eirik, Norway.
There is nothing going on in the chess world to interest the public at large.
The #1 problem is PACE.
The PACE of games needs to be changed. Nobody wants to have to sit for 5 hours for a Classical Game.
I am not sure what the specifics are, but *somebody* came up with a time control mechanism that changed the PACE of the game. You had to move every minute/2 minutes or so, but not sure of the specifics. I forget what it was called but I believe Maurice Ashley (?) was a proponent of it at one point.
Anyway, the PACE of the game makes it suffer for commercial viability on TV. Sure the chess suffers somewhat, but the action would be great and that is what sells the cow.
The #1 problem is: S.S. and the USCF? !!! 😉
Image
Susan;
As a follow-up I will say, if this was a serious question, that the #1 problem is a lack of interesting commentators. Even a great annotator and nice guy like Seirawan (I have met him, yes) is boring during a live feed.
What the game would need are fairly strong yet “mainstream” personalities to comment on games for television. People who can play at 2200+ OTB or 2400+ cc and yet have normal jobs and lives, and can knot a tie if they have to be seen in public.
Oddly enough, since you claimed to have asked non-chess playing people, who likely have never tried to make this hobby or profession sound interesting – or at least not geeky – at a get-together, how on earth would THEY know what it takes to make anyone watch chess on tv??
Ken
I keep seeing stuff about how slow chess games are, and that’s why chess isn’t popular. This can’t be the problem; if so, how do you explain people watching 500 mind-numbing race car laps? Cricket games can take longer than chess games to finish. Rapid games have apparently done nothing to popularize chess. And finally, Susan herself said that the marketing folks didn’t find problems with the game itself. It’s gotta be something else, which is encouraging.
For certain, it is the image of chess in the USA that defeats it being instilled according to marketing professionals.
Further marketing issues that were probably not mentioned are:
1. The sense of family that chess brings to all people regardless of their station in life is not important to the USA anymore.
2. There is the perception that there is no big money in chess.
3. The russians have so dominated the chess world that the USA suffers an insurmountable record.
4. Nationalism in the USA is not tied to winning chess.
5. American people want to be entertained, not mentally exercised.
6. Chess is either not viewed as a true sport, or it defies a proper description of what exactly it is.
7. When the axiom “chess is life” is mentioned, it has a ring of condescension to it that does not appeal.
8. Children learning chess is for the elite in the USA, not the common man.
Imagine a weekly Chess Game Show with two GM’s going at it. You can call in and vote (Like American Idol) for a move at each junction. The PACE would be lively, sprinkled with reasonable commentary, broken up with reports on the current National and International Chess Tournaments or matches.
There is ALOT you can do with chess if you do it right and solve the biggest problem: PACE.
I don’t think Sam Sloan or image has anything to do with main stream success. The mainstream doesn’t even know who Sam Sloan is. He does hurt existing member base and sponsors though.
Many people are not interested in chess. But many people are not interested in soccer or poker. But the daily increasing outlets for information on the internet and cable and their coming merger will make chess spectacularly popular in it niche group.
churchill40
As I said in an earlier reply, I think the main problems are:
1. Image – Chess has a bad image in USA as a game for geeks, nerds and the super smart.
2. Unfamiliarity – The average American doesn’t understand what the game is about or how to play it.
If the object is to get chess on television, it bears asking, what do you want the television show to look like? Poker is a good comparison — it wasn’t anything to watch until they found a way to show the audience what each player had, what their probabilities of winning were, and had announcers able to discuss what was going on.
— Daniel
In chess, what do you show? The board, the players, what else? What do the announcers talk about while the players are thinking about a move? Do you show blitz games, during which there would be no time to show any of the interesting side variations and traps? Or do you show tournament games, when you would have to fill long periods of time between moves? Or is one episode of a chess t.v. program one round of a tournament, where the show jumps from board to board as the announcers show the interesting positions, maybe including some player commentary taped after the game?
The main problem is that there is little surface-level fascination. This is due to a few things.
#1) rules and tactics are too obscure compared to bowling (knock down pins with a ball) or billiards (knock balls into holes) or even poker.
#2) not enough photogenic or charismatic players are in the spotlight (what spotlight?). Garry Kasparov and Maurice Ashley have loads of charisma and TV-worthy faces, but both have quit playing. We need a attractive GM level player to be the “face” of US chess. Imagine the media reaction if Paris Hilton started dating, i don’t know, David Pruess, an IM and a decent looking guy.
#3) There’s nothing at stake– not much money, and not much prestige either. Consider the complete lack of media coverage for the Frankenberry Championships. They were in Stillwater Oklahoma (????) and the USCF is centered in Crossville Tennessee (????). Were these locations specifically designed to inconvenience media outlets as much as possible?
Might I make the modest suggestion that, if you’re devoted enough to the game to frequent this blog, chances are you’re too close to the situation to know what the problem with the general public is? Enough guessing — Susan, we’re listening! What did they say?
Clarification to the last post. I did not mean to say that the public is the one with the problem. That should have read, “our problem in the eyes of the public”.
Dan
1. The game may be less popular in the States.
But then, so is football (i.e., soccer).
Perhaps it’s a cultural thing?
🙂
2. No suits!
🙂
3. Marketing guys tend to tell you what you want to hear.
Could they know what it takes to make chess interesting? Chess can be pretty boring!
🙂
4. Chess needs a basic understanding of the rules. People who don’t even know rugby can, sort of, understand the idea of what’s happening on the pitch.
Can the same be said for chess?
5. Commentators like Maurice Ashley would help!
The # 1 problem is: TRUST, or lack of it towards chess institutions and their ability to be credible.
I am personally a marketing manager in big pharma company and that is my opinion (I am also a chess player rated around 2000 ELO).
Greetings Susan for a very good blog