Chess.com is offering me Diamond free 10 day trial membership and ofcourse thats good and very generous yet you have to enter your credit card numbers and ect. I would still do it but im 14 so Im left out of the fun so leave your opinion.

Ask your Mum/Dad/Guardian to allow you to use their credit card. To be fair, there's not much point in giving you a trial, if you have no means to buy a membership (if satisfied), is there?

The famous words: "to be fair"

Well to be fair why should not a 14 year old be allowed to a 10 day trial at free 10 day Diamond trial membership?

I have said before that youngster should be allowed free a 5 to 10 day trial membership.

How to establish that a newcomer is below the age of say 18? I have no clue.

What I can say is the future in chess perpetuation belongs to the younger generation, no contest here, I would say.

And if chess.com cannot find a way to prove the age of a person, why simply not allow a 5 to 10 day trial membership, once, and since they have the IP address of the computer that the person is using and can verify if there is abuse then simply not allow a second free trial period.

As for the second part: “no means to buy a membership”, again perhaps the youngster that will be truly hooked by the premium membership, may want to ask some money contribution from his family to pay for it, rather than other gifts, for Christmas this year to be able to buy the membership so dearly cherished.

Why remove a dream from a youngster? This is the most fascinating thing in the world to see a young person aspire to obtain something and want it so dearly that she/he will use all of his resources to try to prove and convince his family that this is a fundamental need for them. Now the family will decide what level of membership they can afford if any at all.

We should give them a chance and suggest as to how they could convince their family to contribute money to be able to buy the membership so coveted.

Perhaps they will ask him to take the garbage out every week for a year if they pay for a full year membership or come up with other schemes that will enable the youngster to earn his membership.

The future of chess and chess.com simply resides in new paid memberships, the “raison d’être” or justification for all businesses is to cover the payroll and all other expenses and at the end of the line or the day have some money left called profit.

No one gets ahead without taking any risks in a business and it does take a vision to see that attracting youngster is the future. What remains to be solved is the means to achieve this goal as in 20 years from now the new generation will play chess, as the older one will mostly rest in peace.

With 2,240,556 members and using say 10% contributing members to create a fund to help youngster to obtain a premium membership at a contribution of  $0.50 to a $1.00 a year, this would bring about $160, 000 a year to grant youngster a premium or paid membership for one full year. That would pay for 5,300 new youngster membership at the Gold level and 3,300 members at the Platinum membership. There is no need to award a diamond membership to youngster as all is not free in this world.

Even at $0.10 per contributor, at a 10% level, this would still bring $22,405, enough for almost 750 new players a year being supported by the site and obtaining a free premium membership at the Gold level.

How would the funds be allocated?

I can make suggestions and I am positive that chess.com would have some insights on it.

Very wordy post Paul, really killed it.

...but how about he just uses his parent's credit cards details? how difficult is that?