Re: The Future of Chess and Getting It "Unstuck" (potential heresy

On Apr 3, 2:10=A0pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/>
wrote:
> richardhut...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:

> >Besides this, you don't even have Chess on TV. =A0It fails to
> > draw at all.

> Changing the rules of chess won't change that.

Certainly it is possible to change that by changing the rules of
chess, and I can prove it.

1) Football is presented on TV in the United States, and is highly
popular.

2) Football has rules by which it is played.

3) Therefore, if you change the rules of Chess to the rules of
football, it could attract public interest.

Of course, if one adds certain conditions to your statement, to make
it:

Changing the rules of Chess, subject to the constraint that the new
rules still describe a game that would be recognizable as Chess, would
not significantly affect the popularity of Chess in the United States.

then, that statement may very well be true.

After all, major Go tournaments and major Checkers tournaments and
major Reversi tournaments are not televised in the United States
either.

Thus, one might well consider it to be a reasonable conclusion that
even with a serious marketing effort, sufficiently large audiences
would not be attracted to, say, a Tsiu Shogi tournament *either*. Even
if Tsiu Shogi were modified to have drops just like modern Shogi (they
could always remove the Drunk Elephant from the board to balance it
out, if it was felt it was necessary).

Live telecasts of games of Jetan with living pieces from Barsoom, even
assuming capture is by replacement and not a fight to the death, might
well attract interest... but the real Mars is uninhabited, so we don't
have that op****tunity.

Still, the Cold War caused Americans to pay close attention to first
Van Cliburn and then R. J. Fischer. So, I would think that if the next
President thinks it is vital to get more American children interested
in science and engineering, because America needs some weapon more
horrible than the hydrogen bomb to survive, perhaps we could have a
cultural change towards an environment more congenial to the
popularity of Chess. Or, the effort might be directed to beginning the
colonization of outer space, which would be more congenial to the long-
term survival of Chess, among other things.

John Savard