The 40th Chess Olympiad is taking place in the Turkish metropole of Istanbul,
from August 27 to September 10th, 2012. A record of 158 national chess federations
have brought teams to Istanbul to participate in this prestigious event, which
is being staged in the WOW Hotel and Convention Center, just minutes away from
the airport.
Press conference with Andrew Paulson
Anastasiya Karlovich:
Andrew Paulson, we are very glad to see you as our guest, our first question
is about the Olympiad: how do you find the Olympiad in general, how do you like
the playing venue, if you were the organizer of the Olympiad, what would you
improve here?
Andrew Paulsen: Well, it’s very exciting to be here,
I have visited Istanbul many times before, but the energy that we see here is
just incredible, very positive. It’s interesting to see that highest level
professionals are doing their job and people from countries all over the world
are participating in such an amazing chess event. I don’t think I can
do anything to improve it, it’s nearly perfect.
My next question
is about the Grand Prixevent which is going to start soon in London. Did you
have any special preparations for such and event. Will you impress chess world
with something special?
I think that the first two events, which we are going to do this year (the
Grand Prix in London later this month, and another Grand Prix in Tashkent in
November) will give us the opportunity to begin working with the players and
with media, and to begin to develop our relationship with the audience. I think
that there will be a very high level of play – everyone is very motivated.
Here I had a great honor to get to know the players who will be meeting later
in September in London, actually in some two weeks.
What about the FIDE Congress, which is going to start in two days? What
are your expectations, what would you like to present during this congress?
Actually, I have never been at a FIDE Congress before, so I can only guess
what it would be like.
I’ve just
learned that you were a general producer of very popular Russian movie “Generation
P”. Would you like to make a movie about chess or anything connected
with chess world one day?
Absolutely, it’s a great dream. Although I don’t think that I myself
would make a movie, I certainly know that we’ll do everything we can to
suggest interactive, complicated and magnificent chess ideas for the next “James
Bond”, “The Bourne Ultimatum” – all of these films,
that go into sequels and sequels. There are some great opportunities to use
chess as a basis for the plot line.
My last question: you do so much for chess, you spend a lot of energy
and money as well. What are your benefits from it, what are your goals?
First of all, the initial and most significant thing that was always important
for me as for the businessman is creating and building things. So I hope that
over the course of the next few years (5, 10 or 15) I would achieve something
like that – I would create some structure in chess that would allow chess
to work as a sustainable business, and not to rely on individual philanthropy
or sporadic interest from one companyor another. My aim is to create a proper
financial footing for chess, so that more and more chess players would be able
to earn a living and more and more chess enthusiasts would have an opportunity
to come and participate in events like this. I think that’s a decent challenge
for a next couple of years.
Journalist: You hired an agency
which conducted a survey about chess players. The results, revealed by the
survey, displayed that around 600 million people are playing chess. How are
you going to convert this number into something meaningful?
In fact, if you read the press release carefully you’ll see that 605
million number is actually the number that FIDE gave to the International
Olympic Committee several years ago in a petition to have chess considered
as an Olympic sport. The reason that I hired special agencies (one of them
"Havas Media Group", which use a special methodology), was because
I didn’t particularly believe this number – nobody would tell
where did it come from. It was just like choosing the number, which would
be high enough, so that people would buy it. In fact, what was strange, that
based on all of the information that we assembled from the abovementioned
sources (and we assembled information from the UK, the USA, Germany, Russia,
India) – it actually seems that 600 million is entirely credible, maybe
even low.
Instead of looking at the whole number, it’s more interesting to take
a look at the way the chess behavior divides itself up in different countries
around the world. Some of the conclusions are rather astonishing: in Western
Europe and Northern and South America 70% of the adult population are playing
chess, and only 30% never play chess in their life. In America: more people
play chess regularly, than tennis and golf together. The raw data from the
polls is available
to any of you without any question.
The second part of your question was: what advantages could I take from such
a huge number of people playing chess? It’s funny, actually, for me the
number of 600 million sounds like a such huge number of people, I imagine, that
even if I was doing absolutely everything totally wrong, it would still make
a very profitable business.
Karlovich:
We wish you good luck in all your projects and thank you for coming to our
press conference.
Links
The top games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on
the chess server Playchess.com.
If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client there
and get immediate access. You can also use ChessBase
11 or any of our Fritz
compatible chess programs. |
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