Phil writes:
This is kind of fun (at least for me): You would probably guess, correctly, that membership in the US Chess Federation is lower than its peak. Guess the year of peak membership, and the decline (as a percentage) in the number of members from that peak.
My reply: I don’t know, but I’d guess that the fraction of members who are kids is much higher than in the past.
Guess: 2001, 15%
Reasoning: I assume membership peaked a few years after the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match and declined thereafter. I believe 2001 coincides with Kasparov vs. the World. As a percentage of the total US population, the peak was probably shortly after Fisher’s title reign, but the total population has grown since then.
Confidence: Extremely low
Guess: 1975
Decline:No idea.
Confidence: Very low.
1973. 75% decline since the peak.
I’ll be pretty surprised if the peak isn’t shortly after Fischer-Spassky 1972, despite the US population increase since then. 75% decline is a wild guess, though I’d be surprised if the decline is only 1-2% or something.
I say 1957. No solid reason. Decline of 40%.
I’d say this is a case where you come with stories as your prior and then pat yourself on the back if you are close.
As I was reading the comments, I came up with several stories:
1. Computer chess appeared on every PC/Mac so sometime in the 1990’s might be it.
2. Bobby Fischer, the charismatic lunatic. Already guessed.
3. When was chess more part of the overall school culture? I’d guess anywhere from the 1940’s into the 1950’s – excluding the Civil War era because I doubt the Chess Federation existed then.
4. Random reason.
5. Recently because of the interest in Kasparov versus the machine. Seems less likely but my prior intuition may be useless.
My guess was 1972, and a 50% decline. Now I’ll go look it up.
Interesting: the dutch version of the wikipedia page actually has membership numbers:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chess_Federation
[Rest commented out to avoid spoilers for anyone who’s reading this but hasn’t checked Wikipedia yet]
I played chess all summer in 1972 due to Fischer-Spassky. Heck, another friend of mine actually attended many of the matches. He was visiting maternal relatives in Iceland and that was the biggest thing to do in Iceland at the time. But following the tournament was pretty big in America, too.
What I learned from that summer is that I’m terrible at chess.
My sister and I did a best-of-100 tournament that summer. She beat me 50 1/2 to 10 1/2 (or 8 1/2, it depends if you count the two games we played with seashells on towels one day at the beach).
I also think the peak was probably Fischer related, and the decline pretty big, but the problem is the absolute numbers have grown. I certainly say that as a fraction of the US population the Fischer period was probably the peak. So my guess is about what Andrew guessed above.
However, if I were trying to create a prior over the peak year, I’d have to make the high probability region be between say 1950 (cold war related) and 2000 (Kasparov / Deep Blue related), and the decline be somewhere between 10% and 75%. In other words, not very sharply peaked.
Peak would have followed Fischer’s win in 1972 but the peak was probably later than that (multi-year memberships exist). 1975, the year he failed to show for his rematch (if not this year then it is probably 2014 what with population growth and all).
My guess for fall off is… 90%. I know from anecdotal evidence that the boom was massive. I know Nova Scotia has, generously speaking, 20 players and a million people. New York City tournaments were apparently getting thousands of players regularly (from a population of 10 million? not sure). 2000/10,000,000 is about 10 times 20/1,000,000 so a fall off of 90% seems reasonable. Canada and the US probably have roughly equal rates of chess playing, probably.
2005, 10%.
Reasoning: population growth, increase in leisure time and disposable income over the course of the 90s, and reaction against increasing tech in their lives lead to more people “trying on” old-fashioned hobbies like chess. But for most it doesn’t “take”.
Actually, that reasoning is totally post hoc, I just guessed it must be a recent year because of the way Phil’s comment was phrased, and landed on 2005 since a lot of membership peak numbers I’ve seen seem to be around there.
Maybe we should consider the impact of the movies “Searching for Bobby Fisher” (1993) and “Brooklyn Castle” (2012) as well as the chess scenes in Harry Potter? I think there might have also been a big push to create chess clubs in schools.
1974, 2/3rds drop.