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Kevin Pacey wrote on Sat, Sep 24, 2016 11:56 AM UTC:

I've tried websearches to find figures for the number of people worldwide who play the 3 "Classic" chess variants (Western Chess, Shogi and Chinese Chess), as given on this website (CVP) under "Recognized Variants", and I've had some success.

Previously I've noted on this website that, circa 2012, FIDE had a report on its website that 600 million (adults) are estimated to play chess.

The figure for Shogi was quite a lot less, assuming the link below refers to the global number of players, rather than those just for Japan.  Less than 10 million in 2006, it seems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_shogi#Changes_in_the_shogi_population

I couldn't find a figure for Chinese chess, except the old entry for it on this website (CVP) estimates millions, or tens of millions, worldwide.

 

By way of comparison, the board game of Go (not a chess variant), which involves no luck also, is claimed to have had well over 40 million players worldwide in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)


Garth Wallace wrote on Wed, Sep 28, 2016 10:13 PM UTC:

Do you know how to find any estimates on the number of people who play other recognized variants?


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'):

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.


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