04-04-2014, 01:10 AM
Adam Bremner Wrote:I was having a look at the size of Opens, and Glenrothes was actually a pretty big field compared to the rest this year. I'm not convinced that at congress level, having titled players attracts entries. If anything, it might be the other way round, because a lack of them makes the events more winnable! It is a tricky one, because you should be rewarded for being good at chess, and these guys are fairly handy, to the extent that if they enter, they win money 99% of the time. Maybe consider restructuring of the prizes to give the lower Open players something like a £50 grading prize that is realistically winnable, and watch as more enter? Worth a shot maybe.
Got bored in the library, so decided to compile some data on variables for congresses going back to 2010.
Ran a regression (with dependent variable being number of entries in Open) and included prizefund, first prize, grading prizes, distance from central belt and number of titled players (FM/IM/GM only) as independent variables. Albeit with a small sample size (n=50), and probably missing plenty of variables, the statistically significant variables are the total prize fund (p<0.01) and the number of titled players (p<0.02). Either players entering opens care about the number of titled players; or the number of titled players is acting as a proxy for another factor.