Chess in America

Just collecting opinions here, but why does chess not grow in America? The USCF has tried to promote the game in schools and elsewhere for decades. State and local chess organizations do the same. Local masters give simultaneous exhibitions quite often, yet the membership in the USCF is around 80,000 in a country of 300 million. Despite decades of effort and promotion, the amount of active chess players in America is less than 1%. Any thoughts?

Originally posted by bill718
Just collecting opinions here, but why does chess not grow in America? The USCF has tried to promote the game in schools and elsewhere for decades. State and local chess organizations do the same. Local masters give simultaneous exhibitions quite often, yet the membership in the USCF is around 80,000 in a country of 300 million. Despite decades of effort and promotion, the amount of active chess players in America is less than 1%. Any thoughts?

Originally posted by lemondrop
american chess needs a bobby fischer
i don't see that in the cards

Originally posted by BigDoggProblem
You wouldn't see a Bobby Fischer in "the cards". He wasn't the result of any outreach program or federation member drive, but rather a lone genius who, luckily for us, got hooked on chess instead of some other kind of intellectual endeavor.

Chess isn't sexy enough for the American audience. We need more people like Maurice Ashley to make the game exciting and pull in money. We need Fabiano and/or Hikaru to start dating supermodels and being more than a little crazy. It wouldn't hurt if one of them won the world championship.

Originally posted by byedidia
Chess isn't sexy enough for the American audience. We need more people like Maurice Ashley to make the game exciting and pull in money. We need Fabiano and/or Hikaru to start dating supermodels and being more than a little crazy. It wouldn't hurt if one of them won the world championship.

Originally posted by sundown316
It was Fischer who created the mess that is US chess today. After he won the title in 1972, he could have done so much more to keep the American chess boom at that time going-books, exhibitions, tournaments. Instead he did nada, zilch, zippo-just retreated out of the public eye, and from then it was all downhill with us.

The USCF must also shoulder it ...[text shortened]... by money-grubbing bureaucrats and bean-counters, most of whom don't even know how to play chess!

American chess needs a cable TV deal - like Texas Hold 'em Poker - and big pots of money for the winners. And a savvy promoter to make it happen.

Maybe the way to start is with youth chess tournaments. Other youth competitions, such as spelling bees and little league baseball, do well on American cable TV. I think American audiences would warm to youth chess faster than adult tournaments in which half the competitors are GMs with unpronounceable (to Americans) Russian names.

Maybe blitz games is the ideal TV format. This leaves time for commercial ("adverts" to my British friends) breaks and you sometimes get into these "move and slam the clock" situations that are exciting.

And if any really big talents emerge from these youth tournaments, the TV deal can follow them as they matriculate through the international ranks.

Ain't going to happen. But that's how it could and should.

Originally posted by lemondrop
I don't think supermodels will ever date a top chess player
top players live in a narrow space and don't make enough money and are just plain boring

I wouldn't worry about chess in America, there are plenty of young talents.

If you are wondering why chess isn't able to gain a more mainstream footing- consider the demographic - half of our members are scholastic - the other half are grey haired folks who were part of the Fischer boom. Our tournaments are grueling 2 game a day or more affairs, with a mix of kids, homeless and AARP. Most of us non-scholastic players have a week of vacation a year, not including a couple cardinal holidays. Would you convince your spouse that your one week should be spent playing in a rundown Doubletree hotel against 12 year olds and hobos? tough sell.
In America, chess is primarily a tool for scholastic kids to pad their college resumes or to load up their dresser with trophies.

Chess in America is missing the 'glam factor'. Geeky just ain't sexy.

EDIT: Maybe what American chess needs is a cute poster boy GM, or better yet a poster girl GM, to promote the game. (God help him if he happens to be Muslim and someone mistakes his chess clock for a bomb.)

Watching chess is about as exciting as watching paint dry.

Originally posted by bill718
Just collecting opinions here, but why does chess not grow in America? The USCF has tried to promote the game in schools and elsewhere for decades. State and local chess organizations do the same. Local masters give simultaneous exhibitions quite often, yet the membership in the USCF is around 80,000 in a country of 300 million. Despite decades of effort and promotion, the amount of active chess players in America is less than 1%. Any thoughts?

Originally posted by venda
The Americans don't like draws.
In top level chess there's more draws than any other result.
The last time I was in New York it was popular in the chess house in Central park so there is limited support for the game.

Originally posted by vandervelde
Football (soccer) and chess resist capitalist competitive way of thinking, chess requires sacrifice and denial, while young Americans since the dawn of the nation were accustomed to earning and an to gain. Positional sacrifice is therefore an too abstract concept for Americans. Football is a game that allows 0: 0, poor coaches and locker rooms that resemble hovels from Italian neorealism from 1950s...
😛