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How to Make Backgammon Sizzle?
Posted By: Bill Calton
Date: Saturday, 31 July 2010, at 1:09 a.m.
The New York Times blog ran an entry "How to Make Chess Sizzle?" Bgonline readers may find it interesting.
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July 28, 2010, 12:27 pm How to Make Chess Sizzle By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN
For years, chess players have bemoaned that chess is not as popular as poker, particularly when it comes to attracting television coverage.
While part of the complaint doubtless has to do with the desire of some players to have their egos stroked, the real issue is money. Poker players earn more because they have higher exposure and name and face recognition. In the United States, more people would recognize the poker personality Phil Hellmuth than Viswanathan Anand, even though Anand is the world champion and has been one of the top three players in the world for almost 20 years. Not surprisingly, Hellmuth earns more money.
The question of whether chess can be more popular and attract more money, especially from corporate sponsors, has become a focus of the campaign of Anatoly Karpov for the presidency of the World Chess Federation.
Five years ago, Jennifer Shahade, a two-time United States women’s champion, wrote an op-ed article in The Times about how chess could be made more popular by borrowing a few marketing ideas from poker. Her suggestions were to teach more people how to play, treat chess as a sport and make tournaments more exciting by adopting a “knockout” format.
The first idea will probably not be sufficient. Even someone who is not a poker expert can understand that a pair of aces beats a pair of nines. But chess, even with the aid of computers for analysis, is not always so clear. And the level of study and understanding required to become even reasonably proficient at chess is much higher than it is for poker.
The second idea will probably not happen. Though it is true that competitive chess is grueling and is covered in the sports pages of some European newspapers, most people will probably never think of it as rigorous, or of its top players as sports stars.
To use another comparison, it is much easier for armchair fans to appreciate and understand the high level of athleticism required to serve a tennis ball 150 miles an hour (or return that serve) than it is for them to recognize the difficulty of playing a competitive chess game for four or five hours. Casual fans understand that it must be hard, but they tend to focus on the mental acuity required, which means that they tend to lump chess players in with mathematicians and scientists. Good luck convincing anyone that those two groups are replete with athletes.
Geico, the insurance company, took a swipe at chess as a sport in a recent commercial starring the football (or, as Americans call it, soccer) announcer Andrés Cantor, famous for his call of, “Gooooooooooooooooooooooooal,” whenever a team scores.
The knockout idea has merit, but it might not find a whole lot of support among players. There was a hue and cry when the World Chess Federation adopted such a format from 1998 to 2004 to decide its championship. Many top players refused to compete and derided the winners as less than championship caliber. Though some tournaments could be held using the knockout format (à la the rapid chess tournaments organized by the Professional Chess Association in the mid-1990s), it probably could not be adopted universally — sowing confusion among fans.
So, what is to be done? Maybe nothing. Or rather, maybe nothing radical needs to be done because a solution is easily at hand.
Though chess cannot compete with poker on television, it does rather well online. In fact, chess is almost ideally suited for the Web, which is one reason why chess sites and online activity have boomed. Reasonable estimates are that there are millions of people worldwide who play chess online.
Carol Phillips, president of Brand Amplitude, a Michigan marketing company, said that chess had something that marketers want. “In the marketing world, the buzz is all about creating community,” she said. “And chess has a natural community.”
Phillips compared chess to Farmville, the online game developed by Zynga. But, she added, chess “is the ultimate game, you don’t have to invent it.”
Given the popularity of live chess events, and the global and regional audiences for many of them, it would seem possible to sell advertising. One model might be the live telecasts of baseball games used by ESPN, in which every half inning, there is an advertisement.
Chess games have no natural breaks, but live advertisements could appear in the margins of browser windows. Actually, unlike live sporting events, which tend to captivate viewers, chess games move slowly, so advertisements might have a better chance of breaking through. In the worst case, game broadcasts might be interrupted every 10 minutes for 30 seconds. That may seem horrible, but if it generated a lot more money — and raised the profile of chess — it might be worth the price.
Even better than passive advertising, Phillips said, would be to get viewers directly involved. For example, people watching live games could guess the next moves, and if they were correct, they would win prizes provided by the sponsors.
“As opposed to something that you passively observe, think of ways to get people really involved — that is the goal, to get people to talk back to the brand,” she said, adding, “The first step is to think about who are these people who are so engaged and then what brands would be interested in this audience.”
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