Logistic Growth of Chess

As always, opinions are my own, not those of Lichess.org.

Year after year I continue to hear the same lamentation from the same people: in USA, [insert game here] is not as popular as chess. This is followed by acceptance that economies of scale do not support growth of their particular game. Perhaps they are right, but even assuming that, we can examine USA growth of games, and we can examine growth of games online and around the world.

On a side note, I question the notion of whether "growing the game" can be further done in any real sense by those most claiming to take credit for doing it. Borrowing from Wikipedia for a moment, further growth of chess seems impossible, let alone intentional growth:

In The Laws of Imitation (1890), Gabriel Tarde identifies three main stages through which innovations spread: the first one corresponds to the difficult beginnings, during which the idea has to struggle within a hostile environment full of opposing habits and beliefs; the second one corresponds to the properly exponential take-off of the idea; finally, the third stage is logarithmic and corresponds to the time when the impulse of the idea gradually slows down...

Thanks to Edward Winter and other historians, we can get a sense of how chess became popular throughout the 20th century. In 1927, the National Chess Federation was founded to organize U.S. participation in the Chess Olympiads; by the time they held a national championship in 1936, US chess associations' membership exceeded 1,000. After Spassky lost the World Chess Championship, American popularity of chess exploded through a combination of nationalist news and entertainment broadcasts. The New York Times further elaborates on The Shelby Lyman Show; I'll leave the rest to historians who document these things.

US Chess Federation has run tournaments, published news and rating lists, partnered with chess shops and schools, and invested in US Chess Live long before Chess.com (and in 2020, PogChamps and The Queen's Gambit) became popular. Leading into 2021 much Lichess code had to be rewritten to keep up with demand; somehow, we barely kept up with the flood of new players, but we survived! Perhaps Lichess can better tell this tale...

I should also mention ACM computer chess competitions, and emergence & growth of commercial chess databases and database software; and I should also mention Kasparov and other grandmasters' competitions against computers. I remember seeing newspapers and hearing news as people enjoyed man's triumph over machines. I enjoyed reading How Computers Play Chess and Behind Deep Blue explaining how chess systems evolved.

For now I'll leave the story of chess growth around the world to historians, and next consider: as players burn out on chess, what are they doing? Many take up (or already had) other hobbies, and some of those hobbies include strategy games. How are those games doing, how have they done, and what factors could contribute to their future growth?

Let's start by considering Monopoly Scrabble, which we know benefited from corporate sponsorship and media attention. Historians suggest that initially, the game became popular through word of mouth, but why should the game become popular at all?

• 1913: the world's first Word-Cross puzzle was published, which became a regular feature in newspapers (crossword puzzles).
• 1931: tile game Lexiko was created and manufactured at a net loss. Players would draw 9 tiles from a bag of 100 and attempt to form words.
• 1938: Criss-Cross Words played using a board was created.
• 1948: Scrabble was given its iconic color scheme and the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles.
• 1953: gameplay and scoring rules evolved, allowing multiplicative scoring and parallel plays.
• 1960s: Scrabble appeared in game parlors, and competitive hustles evolved quickly.

Players and spectators find the game beautiful, and word game enthusiasts find a familiar challenge. Random tile draws generate excitement similar to modern PC games like Oregon.
Mass media have since reported on Scrabble tournaments. In 2008 corporate sponsorship of competitions terminated; supporting a competitive scene wasn't profitable. Tournament rules forbid players to use printed materials; gatekeeping will forever throttle growth of the game, although the game's beauty and acceptance in popular culture will carry it forward without further growth.

Do strategy games require corporate sponsorship to grow? Let's consider go:

• Ancient history: weiqi originated in China, later flourished in Chinese culture with continuous government recognition and support
• 5th-7th century: baduk spreads to Korea
• 17th century: Japan replaces start position with an empty board, establishes 4 go schools, sponsors competitive play and a formal ranking system
• 19th century: Korschelt published descriptions of the game after his time in Japan
• 20th century: Japan promotes go through overseas centers, professional tours, and publications. Computer go tournaments are sponsored.
• 21st century: DeepMind research team creates AlphaGo

Fine, we found one popular game which doesn't require corporate sponsorship, but relied upon state sponsorship. In contrast, Chinese chess also has state sponsorship, so how is it faring?

• 1962: Chinese Xiangqi Association was founded
• 1968: Singapore Xiangqi General Association hosted the first Southeast Asian Xiangqi Championship
• 1978: Asian Xiangqi Federation was founded
• 1981(?): development of Chinese chess software (30 years after Shannon's western chess computing paper)
• 1990, 1991: Singapore and China hold world championships
• 1993: World Xiangqi Federation was founded
• 2014: American Xiangqi Association was founded

It is unknown how many Chinese chess players exist west of China. It is unknown how many members each association or federation has. It is unknown whether there are plans to globally promote the game. Let's turn to the other extreme (games with no sponsors)...
Chess 2: The Sequel (not sponsored) was released on Ouya and Steam in 2014. Players may choose from six unique armies, and when a piece captures an enemy piece, players bid stones to decide the outcome. The game includes correspondence and engine opponents; I've never found an opponent for a live game. If anyone wants to test whether "growing the game" can be done without grifting, here's your chance! Content creators already produced gameplay videos.

I won't delve into the popularity of transaction-funded strategy games. How about 5-in-a-row?
https://youtu.be/XtLncoOhgB8

I'll get to the point. We know that organization and sponsorship promote growth of a game, as does having regular competitions, as does having software to practice against and to review games with. In 2018, ladies' professional Karolina Fortin graced us with her Master's thesis which surveys international growth of shogi, identifying key community and popular growth concerns:

• Human skills and labor; lack of cross-organizational support/collaboration; "only volunteers"
• Lack of challenges (opponents to play against) and lack of spaces to teach or play
• Lack of materials, literature, and tools (plus a language barrier); lack of merchandise (plus shipping fees)
• Lack of sponsorship to support regular activities and skilled teaching
• Lack of information/know-how and awareness
• Lack of a common platform for information exchange (such as access to new shogi theories), plus a language barrier

... and identifies many potential solutions, which I sample (please read her thesis for more):

• Marketing: using new ways to promote shogi, not concentrating solely on Japanese culture
• Tackling the difficulties of shogi beginners
• Supporting promoters or at least by acknowledging their hard work
• Creating new challengers for players, like tournaments or possibility of challenging a professional
• Creating common platform with available literature and ways to obtain tools in English
• Creating English commentaries for applications with Japanese commentaries

Chess had similar albeit lesser challenges as it migrated from India to Persia to Europe and beyond. Chess growth has benefited immensely from books translated across languages in an era before computers existed, and benefited even more from an explosion of chess software and databases, and a multitude of common platforms and markets and even piracy, all making the game easier to learn, play, and study with the world's leading experts an email and a modest coaching fee away.

Why is shogi uniquely positioned to grow while other strategy games languish?

• Shogi is an excellent strategy game! In the west we embrace the insanity which are crazyhouse and bughouse, only because we are still learning shogi.
• Shogi is wildly popular in Japan. The Japanese Shogi Association promotes international collaboration including the World Shogi League, and publishes online content.
• Common lesson distribution and competitive play platforms PlayShogi, Lishogi, 81Dojo, and Shogi Wars emerged, the latter two of which have JSA support. Sure, there isn't yet a common blogging platform (for non-forum opinions), but I have hope.
• There are dozens of shogi content creators on YouTube, some of whom either provide English captions or enable automatic captions or auto-dubbing. Additionally, there are content creators in other languages.
• Machine translation software (DeepL and Google translate) with difficulty empower users to translate shogi materials which can be purchased through Nekomado, although this know-how is not well-known.
• Free software enthusiasts produce and distribute top-tier shogi engines which run on every platform, in addition to PlayShogi and Lishogi providing free online analysis.
• FESA (Europe) and various countries hold regular international and national shogi championships.

In the face of this... about chess I frequently hear about how Chess.com is "growing the game" for a game which has fully saturated, in collaboration with an international organization (FIDE) whose main contributions are regulating Olympiads and world championships. Then I look at the work so many shogi professionals and volunteers put into growing an international shogi community and their many achievements, yet I hear fatigue and jealousy from an international community's loudest voices. To be clear, I am using this definition:

fiercely protective or vigilant of one's rights or possessions

... and OK, in a tenuous situation it is natural for self-preservation reasons to feel loss aversion (fear of losing what already exists). It can even be natural to be curious and question everything with a healthy skepticism, especially as there is not a single clear path forward and international communities seldom collaborate with each other. But at some point... crazyhouse, bughouse, and other chess variants are maddeningly complex and lack any kind of professional sponsorship, yet they're doing well; yet somehow we have doubts about growing an international shogi community? Is that right? Are we that afraid of language barriers, even while machine translation gets easier and better by the day? Do we need LLM-powered agents to teach us everything, and will we learn to appreciate the game before they claim to?
We understand that shogi positions can be evaluated by four factors:

• King safety
• Initiative (imminent threats)
• Piece activity (long-term threats)
• Material (longest-term potential)

and after months of play, if we are any good at the game we learn that all these factors matter, not just material. We learn what Hidetchi and others teach about attack speed (initiative moves to mate), we learn that loose pieces drop off, we learn that promoted pawns and pieces are swift, and dozens of other traditional proverbs which encode common sense principles which apply in a wide array of positions. We learn these fundamentals which even LLM-powered agents or young children are capable of learning, so we can then take up the challenge of refining our evaluation skills & learning how to move from evaluating a position to identifying goals in a position before we even start calculating variations.

Most amateur chess players also get lost in an intractable web of variations, because their evaluation skills are deficient. Silman's The Amateur's Mind speaks about this, as would any chess master: once you have evaluated the current position and feel that a particular variation looks more interesting than other tractable possibilities, then you play the candidate move with confidence in your tactical acuity and evaluation skills. If you have only calculated and you have not evaluated, good luck identifying which possibilities are tractable/potentially interesting to explore.

Evaluation isn't about producing an engine debugging value; it's about identifying relevant considerations in your position and in your opponent's position. Sun Tzu's The Art of War generalizes this, but common sense principles like "castle and connect your rooks" and "activate your worst-placed piece" etc. obviously apply. Given an overabundance of chess literature and easy access to chess coaches and libraries, identifying relevant factors in positions is a matter of copying what experts do -- not just memorizing moves, but learning to apply key ideas. Can you imagine memorizing your way to the grocery store, only to find a puddle in the sidewalk?
If your understanding of how to evaluate a chess position is brittle, you are playing hope chess. Ditto for shogi, or any nontrivial strategy game. As proof I offer my first 100 rated shogi games on 81Dojo where I repeatedly got my teeth kicked in, plummeting to the rank of 9-kyu. I was calculating my best every one of these games, but I only understood material and initiative (threat to win material or mate). As a chess player who wins most of their games, losing consecutive games was soul-rending - I actually took multiple year-long breaks during my descent ot 9-kyu, and thought I would quit the game entirely:
How even with encouragement did I get past this situation? I reviewed my games, but far more importantly I listened to advice from stronger players (including opponents in post-game analysis). By learning what king safety and piece activity are (to protect my king, never block my rook or bishop, not leave loose pieces lying around, and that initiative moves are worth far more than material) in about 200 games I rapidly climbed to amateur 1-Dan (1500) much to my astonishment.

Thanks for bearing with my research and rambling. Complex questions have complex answers, if they can be answered at all; but that is no reason on its own to despair. Through sharing experiences and having an open mind, we can incrementally learn things together.