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Where can I buy a chess set similar to the one used in Lyons 1990?

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Fer8799

You are right Ron, the new one is horrible!

Fer8799
Pierre0637 escribió:

There are three judgments on value in your post:

-What is harder to make (carving complexity) should be more expensive.
-What is older should be more expensive.
-What is rarer should be more expensive.

I find I can barely agree with one: that something that is harder to make should be more valuable, maybe I can agree with that, It's not always true, but maybe it should. 

That something that is older should be more expensive I definitely disagree. It depends what the object is attached to not its age. In this case it is a set that is identical to a no longer made set that was used for both tournaments that had the best players of their age (Linares look at the pics in this thread it is amazing) and some great championships (Lyon).  The set is attached to the era. It will mean more to some people than a collectible from another era. Who says a set that Fisher played with in championship should be more expensive than one played by Kasparov, Karpov, Anand, etc.? It's not because it happened further in the past that it is somehow better or more interesting in itself.

Now that something that is rare is more expensive. Well it depends where. Take Gold. You can probably mine it from asteroids or in the long run other planets. It is rare but not THAT rare in the universe. Now take human excrement. Yes that. It is probably much rarer in the universe than gold. Probably if you needed to make food somewhere on another planet you'd give all you have to buy human excrement to be able to raise some crops (provided you had an atmosphere of course). So I know which one is actually rarer. But for some reason the other one has the most value ;-)

You will say yes but there is lots of human excrement on earth but very little gold who cares about the universe? I will say yes and there are lots of chavet sets owned by people in France who couldn't care less about selling them, but the chavet sets are rare where the buyers are: in the US and the UK....

Thanks for you thoughts Pierre, although I'm not agree with them happy.png

Anyway, Law of supply and demand rules will set the price in the future.

maik1988

3000 Dollars for any wooden set is ridiculous to me. There is crazy, and then there's this, which is really out there. Having said that, the only reason why we can buy wooden sets for 20 euro/dollars is because the craftsmen are being exploited for their talents. A set of decent materials (wood, finish) and made by any skilled craftsman in a first-world country would cost 4-500 euro/dollars at minimum. But 3000? For 3000 dollars, I reckon you could buy Fischer's personal set on the black market.

maik1988

As far as the idea that if Chavet reintroduced these pieces, they would earn a lot of money / make bank, I don't think that that's true. There's interest in the pieces for sure, but what would happen if they were mass-produced once more? They would become readily available, after a couple of years lose that touch of mysticism and become just another set of chessmen. And then Chavet would go out of business again happy.png

Fer8799

Chavet chess products belong now to jurabuis.com, and they still produce chess pieces. It would be easy to do an "special edition" of pieces used in WCC, get good money during a few years, and continue working with you usual production. I guess companies always have a lot of new initiatives running, and at the end of the day, chess is an small part of juraz business.