Sponsorship and Promotion of Chess Tournaments

Imagine if someone decided to pump $200,000 into our young chess players or even into any part of chess in Australia. It would go towards boosting the profile of chess in Australia. Advertisements could be made in papers rather than just being mentioned in articles.


Susan Polgar comments on her blog that in the last 3-4 years $650000 US has been pumped into the young players of Chess in the United states by the Susan Polgar Foundation. She also comments that when she took up the challenge of finding sponsors people told her that it was "impossible to find chess sponsors". Sound familiar?


At least in Australia we are starting to get some sponsorship filtering through. Lidmus has been a strong supporter of chess since forever. Recently the Doeberl Cup finally got some sponsorship which added a couple of grand to the Open prize pool.


And Recently the NSWCA found a sponsor in Integra. How they found this sponsor i do not know but..... good on them. But what concerns me with the NSW Championship is that the prize money for the championship division does not seem to be substantial enough to warrant the top players coming out to play. Consider this: The first prize in the State Championships is $600 which is about the same that one might get for winning a NSWCA Weekender tournament. Only that rather than driving to the venue twice in one weekend you have to go for 9 sundays. Is It really worth their money to play. Consider the amount of petrol a player has to use for 9 consecutive Sundays. Is the first prize worth it?.... Of course they could just be enthusiastic and wanting to play the championships just for the fun of it. But I have another Criticism. The Championship division is now open to over 1900 rated players now rather than only over 2000 rated players in previous years. Doesn't this somewhat diminish the Quality of the championship division? As for the Major, It has only a 300 ratings gap to play with (unless there is several committed souls who are rated under 1600 and want to play he Major!?

I think if chess is to become more mainstream it needs to get away from the middle of the papers and start going closer towards the covers even if it is on the very middle of the sports pages. Chess in Australia needs promotion. I dont think that it is enough to have an entry form available on a website.If the NSWCA wants to increase the numbers at their tournaments they need to start a guerilla Marketing strategy or otherwise loss after loss will be incurred. Take the July Weekender for example. They got 38 people at this weekender (which is an increase on the last regular weekender). I believe that if the NSWCA had sent an email reminding people say once a week for a month before the tournament date there would be more people at the tournament. People have busy lives. They Forget about things but if you keep reminding them it sticks.
I draw readers attention to this exchange on chesschat.

Bill, In My Opinion the advert for the tourney being on the NSWCA website is too passive. The NSWCA Needs to get out there and aggressively look for people to attend their tournaments. Mail the clubs some adverts. Mail interstate some adverts. Regularly email people, get in their face.

The NSWCA Mailout Is not a bad idea but people think "That's a month or two away i'll put that to the side" and then they forget about them. If people see the flyers at their local club it reminds them that the tournament is coming up As does the emails i previously mentioned.

Further more the adverts are too far down the NSWCA Webpage. I reckon the NSWCA should rearrange the website so that the upcoming events are up the top followed by news from NSWCA and other events.