My thanks to Alan Rodenstein for letting me know about the 2010 census report that mentions chess.
Table 1240 (Adult Participation in Selected Leisure Activities) has this information:
For the projected adult population of 228,112,000 they had these frequencies:
Participated in Chess in the last 12 months: 6,896,000 (3.0%)
Participated in Chess 2 or more times per week: 549,000 (0.2%)
Participated in Chess once a week: 533,000 (0.2%)
Participated in Chess two to three times per month: 823,000 (0.4%)
Participated in Chess once a month: 576,000 (0.2%)
Many years ago, I remember talking to the late Bob Karch while he was setting up his American Chess Service in North Seattle. He was using numbers like this to project how many members he could expect to join his club. He told me something like, “There are 500,000 people in Seattle. If only 10% of them play chess and if only 10% of these join my club, even if only 5%…”.
Of course, the number of people making the leap from playing a game of chess once a month or once a week to actually paying money to join and compete was almost infinitely smaller than his projections.
Here’s the breakdown from the latest age group report:
[code]Type Total % Reg 12/below 13-15 16-19 20-24 25-64 65+
Total 81388 49.3 34463 8497 5554 2180 22581 8112[/code]
So, with 32,783 current adults (20 and older), that represents just under one half of one per cent of those estimated by the Census Bureau as having played chess in the 12 months ahead of when the census was taken.
Given that we ranked below word games (eg, Scrabble), I wonder how many members there are of the Scrabble Association?
Then again, how many people make a living playing or teaching Scrabble?
I wonder what would happen to ratings if a significant fraction of those regular (define how you wish) chessplayers became tournament chessplayers. I’d imagine that a significant number of those that we get, we got because they were the best in their school/job/family. That doesn’t necessarily imply a rating of even 500. Would this push up the top ratings so that a really good player would find himself over 3000, or would there just be an even huger pile-up between 100 and 150?
Having run an event for 25 years that brought in a lot of first-time adult players (The Cornhusker State Games), I doubt it would have much impact at all on ratings over about 1200. Those adults who stuck with it long enough to get established ratings would likely wind up in the 500-1000 range.
There is a book on Scrabble players called “Word Freak.” Both chess and Scrabble players have some similar annoying characteristics according to the author. They obsess about ratings, too.