Kevin Pacey wrote on Wed, Sep 28, 2016 11:27 PM UTC:
I haven't tried to find estimates for other Recognized Variants using websearches, though I'd suppose such estimates would be hard to find, as these other variants would be played less than any of the Classics (which have their own organizations), I'd also guess.
Not that it may help much, but, fwiw, back in August I posted:
Below is a link that may be of some interest; for 2015 about 3% of all games played on the FICS chess server were chess variants (of the limited choices available, some of which I can't tell since they're called wild), which is very slightly better than I'd expect based on my estimate of chess players interested in variants worldwide (i.e. about 2%, which it pretty much is for stats for 'All Years'):
Note that in an older Comment I had estimated 2% of all chess players were at all interested in Chess Variants, largely excluding the 3 Classics, or Korean Chess, by noting the number of people who've become members of this CVP website (approx. 3400). I then compared the number of estimated adult chess players worldwide (605 million, on FIDE's website, which sort of corresponds to ours, which uses other language entries in places, i.e. both websites are international) with the number of FIDE rated 'serious' chessplayers, i.e. 170,000 circa 2013. The latter would correspond to the # of CVP members ('serious' variant lovers). By using these three numbers, I estimated 12,100,000 are interested in Chess Variants worldwide, but with the noted exclusions (though note for technical reasons popular Bughouse is not on Game Courier on this CVP website , but popular Crazyhouse is). About 40% of people currently have their own internet access worldwide, I've seen elsewhere, so my estimate may not be wildly off just because of that factor alone.
I haven't tried to find estimates for other Recognized Variants using websearches, though I'd suppose such estimates would be hard to find, as these other variants would be played less than any of the Classics (which have their own organizations), I'd also guess.
Not that it may help much, but, fwiw, back in August I posted:
Below is a link that may be of some interest; for 2015 about 3% of all games played on the FICS chess server were chess variants (of the limited choices available, some of which I can't tell since they're called wild), which is very slightly better than I'd expect based on my estimate of chess players interested in variants worldwide (i.e. about 2%, which it pretty much is for stats for 'All Years'):
http://www.ficsgames.org/2015_stats.html">http://www.ficsgames.org/2015_stats.html</a></p
Note that in an older Comment I had estimated 2% of all chess players were at all interested in Chess Variants, largely excluding the 3 Classics, or Korean Chess, by noting the number of people who've become members of this CVP website (approx. 3400). I then compared the number of estimated adult chess players worldwide (605 million, on FIDE's website, which sort of corresponds to ours, which uses other language entries in places, i.e. both websites are international) with the number of FIDE rated 'serious' chessplayers, i.e. 170,000 circa 2013. The latter would correspond to the # of CVP members ('serious' variant lovers). By using these three numbers, I estimated 12,100,000 are interested in Chess Variants worldwide, but with the noted exclusions (though note for technical reasons popular Bughouse is not on Game Courier on this CVP website , but popular Crazyhouse is). About 40% of people currently have their own internet access worldwide, I've seen elsewhere, so my estimate may not be wildly off just because of that factor alone.