chess/poker

Dear Sirs,having been an ex england junior(top100 in world for age)and hence played for a lifetime...found no other avenue to make a living other than coaching...like my father at 75 years of age...recently discovered poker,and found more money to be made there,with no formal coaching or even having read a book.i believe chess should be marketed to make the game appealing to players who spend decades studying.only to realise poverty awaits..)

Or do something that actuall benefits the world ;).

How could che$$ be marketed to make as much money as poker?

One dont play chess because he wants to make money, so much time spend for so little money.

they could always turn it into cashcow with corporation sponsored teams and people wearing jacket bearing the logo of corporations, throw in a bunch of commentator and sex scandals

I can already imagine chess players wearing a race car driver like plastic clothing with Wal Mart and Shell logo

maybe even make players do scripted trash talk before match begins liek pro wrestling

excellent.."mucho trabajo,para poco dinero"...agrred..same in poker to start with...perhaps a 70 cent profit for a 3 hour tourney..for top ten p/c of players...but the time spent,exponentially increases profit IF you find you have any talent.As a mind sport...luck,bluff,patience and timing...and not getting suited and booted with any weaknesses...as in chess,any nemesis will tell you or maybe not!hahaha

Games like poker don't make money because they attract greedy people per se.  It's that the objective of poker IS to make money.  The objective of chess is to win.

For every person making money in poker, there is somebody losing it.  So only the best can make a living at it in the long run.  It's not total luck, which explains why the same people are still making a living at it 10+ years later.

The entire poker economy is built on 80% of the players thinking they can make money off it and maybe 5-10% actually doing it. You better be *really* darn sure you are in that 5-10% before you try to play seriously.

You've never actually played poker have you?

The reason Poker took off is because people who wanted it to take off figured out how to make it appealing on television.  A big part of the appeal is that poker players can talk to each other during the game.  That banter helps to thicken the plot and takes a lot of the burden off of the commentators during the broadcast.  Watching a couple of Russians silently glaring at one-another might be a tough selling point for chess because it puts the entire burden of narration on the commentators.

I think the main reason poker took off was the hole-cam.  Once people could see what the players had, it made it much more interesting.  Poker was televised for many years before the hole-cam, but it didn't do much.

The thought of a hole-cam in chess is eerily frightening . . .

Yeah.  I don't want to know what they have.

Pretty much like a pyramid scheme.

Nothing like a pyramid scheme.  A pyramid scheme always crumbles at the end.  Only those that get in first have a chance to make money, and they have to get out before it crumbles.

That's sort of a meritocratic pyramid then

Not everyone who is a poker "pro" is actually making money off of poker. A lot of them are degen gamblers living off anything they can beg/borrow/steal, and a lot of them are only profitable because of sponsorship deals. There are a few who really do make money off it, though, but they are the master-equivalents.

The rake and variance can bust almost anyone in the long run.

What people dont see is that many (if not all) top notch poker players play a lot of cash games and games against fish like us.  In these games, they win and they win a lot.  An average Joe like me has very little chance at a table with Phil Ivey over the course of a couple of hours - truth be told I would be happy to lose a hundred to Phil just to say I played against him.  They bank on that and there is no analogy for chess players (Jude Acers notwithstanding, whom I lost to for the bargain price of $10).

That's actually a pretty good analogy to the chess economy. When I play in a big event, I'm bankrolling the Open Section prizefund while competing for the much smaller UXXXX prize fund, and master-level players are usually given free entry to compete for my overlay.

I agree with Archaic. Poker is appealing not only to TV, but also for movies as well. Casino Royale, Maverick, The Sting and many other classical films depict poker in games during their climaxes. Chess hardly ever appears in movies as a highlight because people can't talk trash and the gameplay is harder to understand if you're not a regular player.

Even if chess was marketed like poker, it still wouldn't work. The reason is because after seeing all this cool poker on TV, the average Joe realizes it's actually fun to play poker. The same can't be said for chess :(