The USCF has a history of losing young players once they get to a certain age (pre-teens). What can be done to retain more young people in chess?
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Retaining young chess players
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It depends. Exactly what is that “certain age”?
Chess might be an attractive thing to do to youngsters… but when life starts to get real (college…) they don´t see as a main activity for living or a second activity (like in some european countries) to complete the living…
If we continue developing chess only as an individual sports only a few will, maybe, live of that and no strong identity with fans can exists, if we start also team competitions among industries, universities, high-school, etc. you increas the number of people that are interested, it develops some feeling of pertainence and also family and companions are attracted to follow the competitions and maybe then, there would be a critic mass so can support people leaving completely o partially from chess.
You could invent a pill that prevents puberty.
It isn’t easy to retain chess players once they get to junior high and high school. Keep in mind that the best and most active young chess players are also the best academically. High achieving kids are told that to get into good colleges, they need a variety of activities. Plus the huge increase in homework (4+ hours a night at a good school) makes finding time for chess hard.
I teach a bunch of high rated high school kids (seven over 1800). It is impossible for them to play a multi-day tournament except during school breaks. Even 3-day weekends are bad because they have homework. The only real hope is 1-day action tournaments held on Saturdays (e.g. the Mechanics’ Institute here in California has a popular monthly series).
By the way, all of my older students are active on ICC and most play a ton of blitz chess. I tell them to play 5-minute for semi-serious games (they rarely have time for standard time controls) and 3 0 or 1 0 for fun.
Michael Aigner
I think most kids try lots of different activities once or twice. It is natural for them to drop out of most of those activities, in favor a couple they want to stick with.
And the chess drop-out rate for kids entering college will always be high.
Thus it is not the fault of the USCF.
Those kids who do not improve much at chess, or who fall behind their chess pals, will drop out.
Getting more adults involved in formal chess tournaments is a bigger issue.
G
Reply to Michael Aigner “fpawn”:
I would say 4+ hours of homework per night is child abuse, and is destructive of the family’s limited evening time together.
Adults cannot work 12 hour days plus weekends for an extended period of time. So why should kids?
“Good” school?
G
The large amount of homework (4+ hours) is preparation for the workload of college. Over 90% of the students at a good high school will attend a college or university. And yes, the top chess kids tend to attend upper echelon high schools.
By the way, the excessive workload is not just a USA problem. Top students in countries like Germany and Japan (just two examples) work just as hard, if not even harder, than the top American high school kids.
My question now is whether Germany also has a big dropoff in chess participation in the teenage years?
I like anonymous’ suggestion above about developing team competitions, especially in regards to industrial leagues. I remember a few years ago industrial softball teams were very popular, and companies were recruiting good softball players to work for them. If being a good chessplayer could enhance a person’s chances of landing a good job (or any job), it might motivate high school and college players to keep playing. Also,having celebrity status and perks in the workplace would be strong motivation for people to continue playing chess after college.
By the way. Why do we always ask each other why people don’t play chess? Has anyone went up to a teenager and asked them why they stopped playing?
Why do not all the kids keep playing football, baseball, basketball, etc. Because they become adult FANS. They watch other people play.
We need to have a good method of having people switch from playing to participating by watching. Look at the Super Bowl. of the 100 million people who watched very few play the game.
The new Chess League is a great start in this direction. Watching on the internet is great. But much more has to be done. We must get people into being very interested in who wins a game. And that goes back to getting rid of draws.
Imagine the fans wanting to know who won the chess game and day after day after day it is draws. Soon they look elsewhere for sports ACTION.
I say get rid of the draw. It is killing chess silently day by day.
Imagine all colleges have a chess team. and all games end in wins. no draws every happen. Each college fields an odd number like 5 players. Every week one team wins 3-2 when close but never a tie. that is what students want. They want to cheer for their school to win and they want a winner not DRAWS.
AS long as the draws are legal in chess everyone is shoveling chip against the tide.
The big secret is that the DRAW rules Suck.
The world doesn’t need very many professional chess players. Start with a dozen or two top-level professional players at most, to fill the slots in the handful of top tournaments per year. Add their trainers and seconds.
Add to this another few dozen younger players, and their coaches and seconds, who are being prepared for the top levels — the minor league, so to speak.
Add a few more to act as chess journalists and commentators. The world doesn’t need too many more chess books, but, OK, a few more to write books, etc.
And then, finally, people to teach others to play chess, organize clubs and events, especially for kids. Their playing level needn’t be the highest.
How many jobs in the chess economy does that add up to? Not many, and it is the last group that is by far the largest.
So it is no great tragedy if very few kids are motivated to become chess professionals.
What one hopes for, rather, is that the game sees plenty of people maintaining a strong interest in chess, joining clubs, playing in a tournament every few years, and following the game, so that there is a vibrant chess culture.
My nine-year old daughter has been playing for three years. But she has a lot of activities – girl scouts, piano lessions, singing, and the previous three years (but not this year) she was also in dance class. In the summers she also is in a play. Chess is only one of several activities. I think a lot of kids are like that. As time goes on I think her interests will get more narrow and some of the activities will be dropped. She says that she likes singing and chess the most, so I don’t think chess will be dropped in her case. But many kids probably have a lot of activities, and some of them get dropped as they get older, and chess is one of them.
At my daughter’s school, chess is pretty popular in grades K through 3 with some kids achieving a fair amount of success (top 100 lists) but by 4th and 5th grades, the amount of homework increases to the point where most kids can’t put in the time to keep themselves on the top 100 lists anymore and so they stop, freeze their ratings at 1200 to 1700 and never play again. Middle school is when team sports kick in so whatever free time they had to play on the ICC or go to tournaments is taken up by basketball, soccer, baseball, swimming, tennis practice. I do think that if there were more opportunities, whether through inter-school chess leagues for middle and high school students or something similar, it might keep more kids involved. Or since many of these kids are busy building community service resumes in high school for college admissions purposes maybe have a group that funnels strong scholastic players into community service teaching chess to less advantaged children.
A solution should be:
forbid them to have girlfriends/boyfriends
forbid them to go out
force them to play/study chess all free time…
These are some pursuits which in-
terfere with chess as kids grow up. Sports, girls, homework, jobs after school, the image of chess
being somewhat nerdy to some, etc.
I encourage my kids to be well-
rounded and not just play chess. The study of chess is its own
reward. Think about the academic
side-benefits of chess. A big
problem with chess (the biggest?)
is that you cannot make any
substantial money from it unless
you are a world-class player or
perhaps a world-class coach. If
you excel at sports, you are going
to be exceedingly rich. This is
very unlikely if you excel at
chess. Most people probably, like myself and my kid, play either for the love of the sport and for trophies/small sums of prize money.
Somebody mentioned industrial leagues. Leagues were a big thing when I first started working NYC back in the late 70s. The Commercial Chess League had 4-5 divisions based on rating with 6-8 teams in each division. Many companies participated, and often companies had 2 or more team in the various divisions. I have participated in the Commercial Chess League in a number of years, but the number of teams was reduced dramatically and they final opened it up to non-corporate teams.
There used to be the Met League which was comprised of chess clubs around the NYC city area including the suburbs. I’m not even sure if that’s in existence any longer.
I know the Bankers Athletic League still is in existence, but they too have recruited for teams outside the financial and corporate sectors.
I miss the comraderie of these leagues, but like the local chess club they seem to be vanishing. Without these local clubs and leagues it’s hard to sustain interest. Many of the youngsters that have come to my chess sclub when they were in elementary school have stopped coming now that they’re in middle school. Why? Too much homework.
It’s just not young people dropping out. One chess club I belong to had 8 players in their last tournament. At 52 I think I was almost the youngest one there. Without fresh faces the club will eventually die.
Most kids will play less chess once they enter highschool. The reason is explained very well by fpawn. There are too many other important things to do in order to get into a good college. But , if USCF and Chess community promote chess well, top colleges will value more on Chess. That will change the weight on the equation. More talented highschool students will continue to devote more time on chess!
Promote Chess at college level!
Quote from Feb 6 1:44am
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“I miss the comraderie of these leagues, but like the local chess club they seem to be vanishing. Without these local clubs and leagues it’s hard to sustain interest.”
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Comraderie from teams is an untapped idea that could provide a significant boost to chess clubs.
Judging from blog postings, the idea has little support.
Each club player would probably need to own a laptop computer (not quite common enuf yet). Then the Seattle Chess Club could play a Saturday match against the Dallas Chess Club…
…Instead of playing each other yet again.
G