I think they're wrong

Real chess (face to face chess) is far more exciting than online chess. 

But I end up playing online because it is hard to find the time or right opponent. It's even hard to set up games with friends. Not to mention setting up a "home made" tournament...

I think someone should build a chess.com or something for setting up real chess games or tournaments but my chess mates tell me nobody would bother using it since online chess is "good enough" and you have chess cafés and chess clubs and and and...

I think they're wrong.

Meet up.com

meetup.com? Has anybody tried it to set up chess games/tournaments?

Hard to find the right opponents? You must be kidding. Hundreds of 1300-1400 players online 24/7.

Of course. It is very easy to find them when playing online but not when playing real chess.

Oops sorry, I misread your opening post.

Great idea. Then 1300-1400 players from around the world could all travel to one place every weekend to play instead of doing it online.

I can't see any practical problems for this at all.

If you mean why don't local players meet up, they do, it's called a chess club. There are tournaments too.

Yes, perhaps you're right and it's a silly idea but let me ask you one question. 

According to FIDE there are roughly 600M chess players in the world and only a tiny portion of them (1%-5% maybe) actually visit chess clubs. If all chess players meet up at chess clubs, why aren't they packed with players every day?

I'd guess most players who don't go to clubs (or tournaments) are inactive. Although your idea is a dream for those of us who don't have a club near us and like to play OTB.

As for 600 million, that seems like a lot. Maybe it's like chess.com's 6 or 7 million in that if you only counted active members it would be much lower.

The 600M comes from FIDE itself. This includes all kinds of chess players, from Magnus Carlsen to some person that just learned it yesterday. 

It seems to me now that most chess club members are very active and competitive players seeking to improve their official rankings. This would explain the huge difference between total count of chess players and chess club members.

For this 80%-90% of players around the world, who are not interested in becoming a member of a chess club but who would like to play more OTB chess, this might be a good tool to increase the number of OTB games played.

Start a thread with the title 'I'm from this and this city, who'd like to play Chess with me OTB?' and see how well you fare with it. Totally in the realm of possibility, and you don't even need to set up a different site for that purpose.

I used to play OTB back in the 1970s when the internet was just a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye.

The social side was nice, though competitive games were a stretch as you often had to travel quite a way, then often wait for the last player to finish when your own game was over in half an hour.  Easier now I have a car ;-)

Skittles games at a local club were the most fun, and the occasional club tournament with a bit more gravitas.  I'm tempted to join a club again, but they'd probably want me to play for a team and that would be a bit of a palaver.  The internet is fantastic for convenience, no contest there at all.

I've thought of finding players on here at a similar level, who don't trash talk or cheat, and setting up some online games or tournaments with them.  Maybe that would be a compromise of sorts.