I. Overview

This document summarizes a discussion held primarily between Harvey Reed and Mark Kaprielian. Harvey had created his proposal after some discussions with Frank Sisto an area Master who has recently returned to active play.

II. Perspective and Proposal – Harvey Reed

A. Situation:

With the success of MCC, we have a healthy growing U1700 group, with a fair amount of rotation and “newbies”. For the Expert and Master level it is a relatively static and small group.

B. Realities:

Experts and Masters comprise only a small percentage of the chess playing population. Thus, since we do mass marketing (web, &etc) of the MCC we will see the percentages that we do today.

C. Proposed Goal:

Increase the ranks of Expert and Master by 2-4 new people per year. This will add to the enjoyment of our current Experts and Masters, and give the U1700 crowd new targets!

D. Past Efforts:

We have come this far by mass marketing, and fine-tuning the sections. This combination of attracting from a broad base, and giving people excellent value has been key to our growth. We must continue these efforts.

E. A Modest Proposal:

We can do targeted marketing to the selected audience of Experts and Masters. We can do this via direct mail. However, we must offer more than extending an invitation to play at MCC. We can offer them an invitation to play in the “MCC Invitational”!

F. Concept:

We offer an invitational once or twice a year (Spring / Fall). The Invitational has two prize bearing round robin sections – Master and Expert. 6 people in each section. 3 from MCC regulars and 3 who haven’t played ever at the MCC, or at least not in the past year. In return for modest entry fees and good prizes, the players agree to:

1. Play their games concurrently with our regular tournaments so our members can see them, and they can mingle

2. Turn in all their play sheets for posting

3. Teach one night of the study group

4. Have their picture taken for the club album

G. Benefits:

This will probably be a loss leader for the MCC. We can consider this an investment to keep the club vital. The new Experts and Masters will hopefully return for regular tournaments, and we invigorate the study group. With an infusion of 2 new Experts and 1 or 2 new Masters each year, we will beat the percentages of recruiting (based on mass marketing) and continue to build a great club.

III. Feedback and analysis of Ideas proposed – Mark Kaprielian

A. General Comments

I think it is a nice idea but my gut feeling, from past consideration of the topic, seems to be supported by my current analysis, which is, there isn't a big enough pool out there to go after.

I also don't think the requirements that placed on the participants are realistic to expect. If we make it past this analysis of numbers phase, I'll have much more to comment on regarding the other aspects of your proposal. Lets do the numbers first.

B. Analysis of Expert playing pool in the vicinity of the MCC

Using the Maca database Membership statistics as a representative base of active players in the area:

The data goes back to all those who were members within the last year

Restricting the data to just Mass players

19	Masters	of which	4	played at the MCC within the last year =	21 %
15	2100s	of which	1	played at the MCC within the last year =	7 %
28	2000s	of which	6	played at the MCC within the last year =	25 %

62	total

In addition, the MCC has one 2000 player that is not listed as a Maca member.

New Demographic Maps showing distribution of players over 2000

Check the Maca site for the most current demographic maps. No link is provided here as it will eventually go bad.

From an observation of the demographic map

There are 21 Experts and above who live in the region bounded by Rt. 128 to Rt. 495 and Rt. 1 to Rt. 93

There are 23 Experts and above who live outside the Rt. 495 belt

Subtracting the 44 we have accounted for so far, we are left with approximately 15 within the Rt. 128 belt Boston area.

I created a spreadsheet containing the count of 2000 to 2199 players in Mass city sorted by name of city. On the spreadsheet I have done a first pass probability assignment of the likelihood of someone attending based primarily on what city he or she live in.

I used 1 % probability to indicate very unlikely and 90 % for very likely.

Using the Maca database, there are 43 people who are in the rating range and were members going back one year.

The table below shows the City distribution of the 43 players. Using the assigned probabilities, we get

12 players who might be induced to play at the MCC.

From the data above, it should be noted that we have 7 of those plus one not a Maca member.

Our absolute pool of players to entice is 43 - 7 = 36

Our probable pool of players to entice is 12 - 7 = 5

The question would then be, how much time, effort and money should be invested to attract those additional 5 players.

C. Conclusions

1. I believe that my conclusions as well as those offered by others will always be subject to much debate. Yes, something may work or it may not. I agree that things are worth trying but not at the expense of current stability. Therefore, I think the most important factors in deciding to try something is not so much what the idea attempted is, but what system wide impact it will have on what exists.

2. I believe the bottom-underlying factor is that the pool of players is just plain small to reasonably expect to attract more to play at the club. In addition, not all players are likely to want to play in a weeknight chess scenario and perhaps limit themselves to weekend events. This makes our percentages effectively higher than they already are for the number of people in the pool who already attend.

3. In my opinion, the Club already has a fairly high proportion of those players in the pool of active players out there already attending the club. Part of this judgment is made with another assumption of how many nights can you expect these players to go out and play chess. If all the players were actually active somewhere, which in itself is a questionable assumption, then, how many could you expect to select attending at the MCC as their single choice. Any effort to exceed attendance above the “natural” level would result in:

a) Pulling people from a pool of inactive players, which is indeed one of the desirable goals. The idea that you might re-activate players by introducing a more competitive environment might in fact be a negative factor. How many of those higher rated players might egoless and wouldn’t care if they started dropping a couple of hundred points? Many players comment on the difficulty of playing well on Tuesday nights. Offering tougher competition will be less attractive for players concerned with their quality of play.

b) Pulling active players away from other clubs. From a personal philosophy point of view, I believe this to be bad for chess in general and should not be done.

4. I don’t believe there is anything of a reasonable effort or expense that can be done to attract stronger players. At any given point in time, due to the imposition of regular life on ones ability a desire to play, the collection of strong players at the club may be thin or thick. Under both thin and thick conditions, strong players may be encouraged or discourage by our thick or thin number of players. If we allow for equal probabilities of players preferring or not preferring whatever the situation currently is, our attempt to manipulate the attendance will always work against itself to an equal degree.

5. I floated an idea of removing the Open section as it is now and replacing it with Open Quads for one event. One Master who attends suggested that it will raise a lot of logistical issues and in fact could result with defeating the purpose of strong competition by a game not being played one round due to someone being not able to attend. He pointed out that issues of prize fund and prizes are significant. One expert and another strong player didn’t find the idea very compelling.

Table of probabilities assigned as mentioned earlier.
			Calculated
City	CountofCity	Mcc Probability	People
AMESBURY	1	1%	0.01
AMHERST	1	1%	0.01
BILLERICA	1	40%	0.4
BRIGHTON	2	70%	1.4
BROOKLINE	1	80%	0.8
BURLINGTON	1	40%	0.4
CAMBRIDGE	9	40%	3.6
CHARLESTOWN	1	1%	0.01
CHESTNUT HILL	2	80%	1.6
FOXBORO	1	1%	0.01
HOLYOKE	1	1%	0.01
LYNN	1	1%	0.01
MARBLEHEAD	1	1%	0.01
MARLBOROUGH	1	80%	0.8
MEDWAY	1	20%	0.2
MILLBURY	1	1%	0.01
NEW BEDFORD	1	10%	0.1
NEWBURYPORT	1	1%	0.01
NORTH QUINCY	1	1%	0.01
NORTON	1	10%	0.1
PEABODY	1	1%	0.01
ROSLINDALE	1	1%	0.01
SOUTH LAWRENCE	1	1%	0.01
STONEHAM	1	1%	0.01
STURBRIDGE	1	1%	0.01
SWAMPSCOTT	3	1%	0.03
WATERTOWN	1	70%	0.7
WEST ROXBURY	1	1%	0.01
WESTON	1	60%	0.6
WINCHESTER	1	40%	0.4
WORCESTER	1	60%	0.6
Totals	43		11.89