18-08-2016, 08:01 AM
Jonathan Livingstone Wrote:I take your point Phil and I agree that rated games should be a consideration in the overall picture. It is never straight forward though. The local league association where I live (The Lothian League), has approx, 40 teams and 14 member clubs. There is not only X Club Team 1, X Club Team 2 etc, but there are many instances of players playing various within multiple divisions. That can skew the data. Even if you can have 1 million games rated over the season, those 1 million games could in theory be majority accounted for by the same 75% section of players, from 2 single regions as an example. It is not always the success story it may appear to be and it becomes very hard to use general data as tangible data for a true measure of the picture.
The state of local club chess must also be used, and the membership numbers of these clubs as a whole. There is often a group of the same players playing in various events. You do also have to look at things on a regional basis also. So yes there are 1 or 2 regions with reasonable activity. But look at the East, and what little it has left in congress activity. The club scene in my council region of East Lothian is a bit grim. We are coming to that time of year where club secs receive their invitations to enter their club into Rich/Spens, or what is left of them (I don't want to give you a heart attack Ian, honestly)
There is of course pockets of happiness, be it the SNCL, a Bon Accord, the Tayside region or a few congress choices in the West. But there is also the many sad situations, of local clubs across the country struggling to survive, and struggling events.
Going back to the Ice Age theory (I am obsessed I know), the Wooly Mammoth died off generaly with the exception of a couple of islands where they survived for another 5000 years after the general extension before becoming officialy absent and extinct. That's where we are?
Jonathan,
seems to me than that your intuition leads to same conclusion as my intuition.
Numbers are needed - are there are many different stats that could be extracted and used.
Interesting point you make about the mammoth (off topic so everybody else may stop reading). Reminds me about big cats in Southern England. For years that have been reports of big cats perhaps a lynx or two or even a breeding colony living wild on Bodmin moor. Photographic evidence has never been quite convincing - but better than the evidence for Nessie.
Earlier this year a lynx escaped from Dartmoor zoo. It was recaptured three weeks later. In that time nobody it seems managed to photograph it. So hard to measure when a species becomes extinct. However, I don't think there are hairy elephants to be discovered in the Scottish wilderness.
Everyone else can start reading again....... Have some sympathy for the CS directors. They have a mammoth task ahead.