Only a Million Dollar Game

Continuing with the Sociology of Chess (November 2016), why settle for a million dollar game when you can have a billion dollar game?

How to make chess a billion-dollar game (10:01) • 'Chess is a great game, and people have been trying to figure out how to market it for years.'

The description continues,

I follow it myself, and came up with a few ideas, both in marketing and radical technical changes, that I think would make a huge difference in how entertaining the game is to casual fans, and the amount of money that top players are able to make. Of course, a billion dollars may seem like a lot, but single NBA teams are worth more than that now, so I do believe that chess as a whole could be worth 1/30th of the NBA. Anyway, check out the vid to hear how!

While there are no really new ideas in the clip, it presents a few ideas that have never been put into practice. Here are a few external references from early in the video:-

• (0:17) How America Forgot About Chess (theatlantic.com; May 2012) • 'The once-popular game is suffering from boring grandmasters and controversial leadership.'
• (0:45) Andrew Paulson (1958-2017) • I wrote about his impact last month on my World Championship Blog: 'The Best Mind Wins' (August 2017)
• (2:50) Magnus Carlsen; page 3150 (!; chessgames.com)

The main advice near the end of the video is to follow the lead of poker, although with a novel, live-action twist. For previous posts on this blog about the same subject see:-

• Chess @ Yahoo Finance, and The Money Game (May 2016; Maurice Ashley)
• Adding Prestige to the Game (May 2017; Rex Sinquefield)

Perhaps one of the problems in these analyses is the excessive focus on chess in America. The 'How America Forgot' article from 2012 linked above knocks the influence of GM Anand and speculates on the potential of GM Nakamura. Which of the two players has done more to raise the popularity of chess, Anand in India or Nakamura in the USA? Chess is, after all, an international game.