Kevin Pacey wrote on Sun, Aug 7, 2016 07:25 AM UTC:
In trying to speculate about how many people worldwide might be inclined to take up almost any sort of chess variant(s) seriously, if an organization for such existed (aside from chess, shogi, Chinese chess, Thai chess or Korean chess, which have their own organizations), I came up with a way to try to estimate the total number of people (x) who may play or enjoy such variants worldwide (i.e. seriously or not so seriously, at the moment at least). The answer's probably off by a lot, but my calculation may be worth a chuckle:
There's about 605,000,000 people who play chess worldwide (seriously or otherwise) according to FIDE. Let's say that almost all people who take up chess variants first learn how to play chess. The number of serious chessplayers with FIDE ratings, alone, was about 170,000 circa 2013, I saw on the web.
Let's assume that most of the people worldwide who are serious about chess variants are members on CVP (which has pages in languages besides English), i.e. about 3,400 currently. From that I can now solve for x in an equation where
170,000/605,000,000 = 3400/x
to obtain the answer that x = 12,100,000 people worldwide who take chess variants seriously or just for fun at present.
Note around 40% of the world population has an internet connection today, so perhaps my estimate may not be far off even considering that.
In trying to speculate about how many people worldwide might be inclined to take up almost any sort of chess variant(s) seriously, if an organization for such existed (aside from chess, shogi, Chinese chess, Thai chess or Korean chess, which have their own organizations), I came up with a way to try to estimate the total number of people (x) who may play or enjoy such variants worldwide (i.e. seriously or not so seriously, at the moment at least). The answer's probably off by a lot, but my calculation may be worth a chuckle:
There's about 605,000,000 people who play chess worldwide (seriously or otherwise) according to FIDE. Let's say that almost all people who take up chess variants first learn how to play chess. The number of serious chessplayers with FIDE ratings, alone, was about 170,000 circa 2013, I saw on the web.
Let's assume that most of the people worldwide who are serious about chess variants are members on CVP (which has pages in languages besides English), i.e. about 3,400 currently. From that I can now solve for x in an equation where
170,000/605,000,000 = 3400/x
to obtain the answer that x = 12,100,000 people worldwide who take chess variants seriously or just for fun at present. Note around 40% of the world population has an internet connection today, so perhaps my estimate may not be far off even considering that.