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Daniel or _____ to the rescue?

Posted By: Daniel Murphy
Date: Friday, 8 June 2012, at 6:27 p.m.

In Response To: Daniel or _____ to the rescue? (Chuck Bower)

Yes, facts are interesting things. I summarized US and European attendance for 1998-2008 here:

http://www.bkgm.com/rgb/rgb.cgi?view+1475

I have no plans to update that.

I don't think those and current numbers show that backgammon is all that much healthier in Europe.

For very well attended tournaments, there's the Nordic Open, there's the World Championship, and there's one or two tournaments annually in the UK. And a couple of tournaments in Istanbul. Attendance on the PGT tour was boosted by a lot of added money from the sponsoring casino corporation, but that sponsorship and those tournaments are defunct.

Some WBA tournaments are doing well, but so are some ABT tournaments. Attendance and federation membership in Denmark is declining. Backgammon faces legal challenges in Norway and Belgium.

One difference between European and US backgammon I've not seen mentioned is the availability of fairly large amounts of sponsorship money in Europe, from casinos, bookmakers and online gaming corporations (not necessarily backgammon). But much of this support is irregular. It comes and goes year to year, or for one-off tournaments.

Imagine an online bookmaker sponsoring the ABT tour ....

I'd like to see less talk about "how things are done in Europe" and more focus on how backgammon is thriving -- or not -- in individual European countries.

There's some kind of backgammon scene in UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Hungary. And a few others. "What's being done" varies from country to country. So do results and attendance. Notice that large portions of Europe -- (hello 82 million people in Germany!) has zero organization nationally and very little locally.

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