As we come to the end of the year, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the state of the US Chess Federation to see how popular the game of chess is across the nation.  So, being a marketing analyst by trade, I took a look at the numbers by downloading the December ‘09 crosstable from the federation website (I knew this club director thing would come in handy one day).

So, I found out that there are 21,535 active members and that most of them come from a handful of states.  And of course NY has the most chess players, right?  To my surprise, I found out that TX has the most chess players!  But I was correct in guessing that most players come from a few states.  In fact, 48% of chess players come from just 5 states (which means 52% are in the remaining 45 states).

So what does this mean?  To be honest, I don’t know! 

I do feel that we are lucky to live in the Northeast where it is pretty easy to find a local club and you can play in a multiple tournaments in any given week.  To let you know how lucky you are, I did some research on chess in other states in the union.  For this article, we’ll take a peek at chess in HI and ND.  In the coming weeks, I’ll add new articles on other chess in other parts of the country.

Chess in Hawaii

Believe it or not, according to the December ratings supplement, there are only 11 rated players in Hawaii.  I found this hard to believe, so I looked up some local clubs and found that there are a handful of clubs in the area (across all of the islands).  Tournament results show that there are two top players out there – Corneliu Rubsamen and Robert Lau.

Robert Lau is a 9th grader with a master level rating of 2266.  Back in 2007, he won a gold medal in the North American Youth Championships in Aguascalientes, Mexico in the under 16 division.  He recently won the state championship, although for some reason, he did not face Corneliu in any of the rounds.

Corneilu Rubsamen is the head instructor at the Mililani Chess Club, located 17 miles Northwest of Honolulu.  He also has a master rating of 2263 and has a number of games featured in the database of chessgames.com.  Based on the games I reviewed, he is a fan of the Scotch Game and has had some success with it.  The link below shows one of his games in the 2007 Hawaii Open in which he shreds the Sicillian Defence of his opponent.     http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1390252

Chess in North Dakota

You’d probably be surprised to find there are any players in North Dakota at all, but there are – 19 of them to be exact.  The top player in the ratings supplement is Mike Sailer – a 16 time North Dakota chess champion who likes to play in the North Dakota “Chessnuts” club.  http://www.ndchessnut.com

The best part of this story is that the club meets at the downtown Fargo Subway restaurant!  They play on Friday nights from 8 pm to midnight and all ratings are based on Game 15 matches. 

So the next time you feel that your chess options are limited and that you can’t find friends, relatives, or neighbors who understand your passion for the game – remember it could be worse.  You could be living in North Dakota (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!!