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I still think that our 60 year olds are comparative winners over our 15 year olds
Our 60 year olds won the Glorney in 1965 and have had a top 10 finish in the European Seniors.
No Glorney wins in 46 years despite £8000 pa on junior chess
When was the last time a junior got a top 10 finish in a european/world junior event ? I believe that Mark Condie, Tim Upton, Paul Motwani and other 40 year old + players have done this
Give me some money for senior chess please
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For this discussion to go somewhere useful, we need to define what the objective is. Are we trying to create new GMs? Are we trying to make the game more popular in Scotland? This is a pretty important question...
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Andy (M), I'd expect the answer to your last question would be Jonathan Rowson, who's definitely under 40, albeit quite a bit over 18. I'm not sure why you're using this as an argument for why junior chess needs less investment though...
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Andrew McHarg Wrote:We need to play the numbers game. 
The flaw is the numbers game doesn't seem to be working. Our youngest IM or GM was born in 1980. Clearly something is going wrong along the way.
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Clement/Calum/Hugh/Andrew and others
What support and/or opportunities is/are needed at your level to help you take the next step and become titled players?
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I think the other players you've named are more qualified to answer your question than I am, David, so I'll let them handle it.
The one thing I will say - and its a point that others, including me, have made before - is that for quite a long time now (at least a decade) our top young players have been reaching levels between 2150 and 2250 and then failing to improve further, and that we should try to make sure this doesn't continue to happen, although Clement and Calum's recent performances are certainly hopeful signs with regard to this particular issue.
One point which shouldn't be overlooked, of course, and which has some bearing on Andy M's comparison between generations, is that it's much less easy to make money from chess now than it was a few decades ago. You need to be a stronger player to get appearance fees (chess in Western Europe never really recovered from the 1990s influx of GMs from the Eastern Bloc who were prepared to play for less), while prize funds are generally smaller. Add in the lure of pursuits like poker, which are considerably more lucrative and apparently very rewarding for people with the kind of thinking skills developed by chess, and investing the large amounts of time necessary to improve to titled strength becomes less tempting.
It's also worth noting, on that point, that the stronger you get, the harder improvement becomes. This increasingly steep curve of development unfortunately corresponds, in most cases, to people's lives becoming busier, with school exams and then university providing a steadily increasing workload. All of this combines to militate against our top young players becoming as good as they can be.
All of this doesn't mean that we should be seeking to make being a 2300 as financially rewarding as it was in the 1970s: that would be a ridiculous line to take. It is, however, worth bearing in mind.
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Interesting Litmus test in the summer. Alex will no doubt be offering conditions for the Scottish. Will be interesting to see how many titled players take it up.
"How sad to see, what used to be, a model of decorum and tranquility become like any other sport, a battleground for rival ideologies to slug it out with glee"
