Making Chess Marketable

I've been thinking about chess.com and publicizing chess. Showing chess online is a great start. The games are so long that you only get to see bits and pieces of the games and that is if you don't work and stay home to watch the daylong match.

Whats my thought?

Change publicized and many chess games to 30 minute time limits or 45 minute time limits. These are short enough time frames to be publisized on tv and to keep viewers interested. Even better is showing 5 minute blitz games as well on a 30 minute showtime. 

Your thoughts?

Bring back 'The Master Game' which was shown on BBC TV in the 80's. The games were pre-recorded and the players gave commentary on their moves and thought processes after which were dubbed over the top as the game was played out. Often complimentary alcohol was consumed leading to some funny comments ☺

How did it fizzle out? 

Not sure, I was too young. They did 3 or 4 tournaments and then it stopped. All the games used to be on youtube, I saw them there but they got taken down. If you tap in master game chess there is a reconstruction or 2 of the original show.

Thank you. That is cool. Thinking about it now there are not many intellectual shows on TV. Unless you count talk shows, usually not very filling, but judge Judy has some street smarts. There is not enough drama in chess and if it were on TV they would probably have to dramatize it like UFC fighters. Fischer did publicize very well though. He was a very smart and likable person.

Perhaps allowing the players to trash talk during the game would help. Would watching Norway chess be improved by this? Naka to Giri: 'Ke7? That's a blunder bro'. Aronian to Carlsen: '1.Nc3? C'mon Magnus what is this?' etc.

I just watched the master game on YouTube. That was a great production minus the variation in piece color on the screens. Showing their times would be nice. 

Keep viewers interested ?  They have already re-tuned to the shopping channel mate

So drama is needed to have entertainment? There is much more to chess and can be added, such as, all the ways chess teaches us about life.

Two words: chess boxing.

Look it up. 😊

Lol. Heard a tall guy talk about that before :-)

I like the idea of showing players analyzing their completed games.

Part of the problem with watching a live chess game is that the experts don't know what the GM is planning and you get a lot of, "What was that?" and it becomes a little boring to watch.  I showed a video of a WC match game, taped while it was live, at the high school chess club I coached and the announcer, after a move that simply made a threat, cried out, "There's pandemonium on the chessboard!"

My players, who were county champions and state tournament trophy winners and interested in good chess, fell over laughing in derision at the announcer's bad attempt to make the commentary exciting.  For the next few years, every time a newbie on the team won his first OTB game or something unusual happened, our team would call out in unison, "There's pandemonium on the chessboard!"

My thoughts on how to make chess marketable:

Step 1: Replace it with something else, like basketball, or football, or twerking, or a sitcom, or reality TV...

Step 2: There is no step 2.

There's no problem to solve. Chess doesn't need to appeal to everyone. The best you could do without ruining the game is handle it like TV poker: they record the whole 120 hour WSOP main event, and just show you a handful of interesting hours.