Games, analysis and discussion

In trying to come up with fresh ideas to suggest for the CFC (or provincial associations) to help local organizers develop Canadian chess, my attention was eventually drawn to the possibility of the CFC obtaining more members and revenue by providing new services that might be seen as having value. With the CFC's financial resources limited, at least at present, I came up with four services (for now) that might be feasible, even possibly sometime in the near future.

The first idea for a service is unoriginal, but it would help the CFC quite a bit in my view. Namely a CFC chess server, or a deal with an existing one, that would give CFC members some sort of a break to use their server. If the CFC ever invests in obtaining a server of its own to the extent that the server would be of fairly good quality (e.g. reasonably good anti-cheating measures), even though it might even then be little distinguished from other servers on the internet, it might be able to compete with them in a way because use of a server would be only one benefit that a CFC member would get for their membership.

The second idea for a service I have is to have one particular Forum on the CFC Discussion Board that is restricted to CFC members only. While I have not thought out all possible benefits this might bring to members, at least it would make possible taking online polls that would be certain to involve only CFC members. Any members might also thus be able to relatively quickly make any of their issues known to any CFC Executive member that's making themselves available online, without having to make such issues available to non-members' eyes. I don't know if there may be some serious technical difficulties in identifying CFC members as opposed to other CFC Discussion Board viewers, however.

A third idea for a service I have is for the CFC to provide a list of top known senior players in Canada, which would be updated on a regular basis.

The fourth idea for a service is for the CFC to rate bughouse (aka doubles chess) events, and to provide regularly updated list(s) of the top bughouse players (or teams) in Canada, along with providing the most official rules for the game that there are. Bughouse is the most popular chess variant by far afaik, and ultimately may prove to be useful for significantly increasing the CFC's revenue. The CFC could also try to proactively encourage at least some organizers to hold more bughouse events in Canada (online bughouse that's played using a CFC server could also be possible).

[update: Below is a link to a chesstalk message board thread that discusses the ideas in this blog entry.]

http://www.chesstalk.info/forum/show...l-CFC-services

Below is a link re: goals the CFC might aim for in future:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/en...-for-in-future

Below is a link re: my thoughts on reduing perceived geek factor of chess:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/en...actor-of-chess

Below is a link re: my perceived benefits & disappointments with offline chess as a master:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/en...-offline-chess

Below is a link re: 12 reasons to play chess without much taking skill level or ambition into account:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/en...-to-play-chess

A link re: why chess is so popular among board games of skill:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/en...games-of-skill

A link re: my ideas about the future of chess:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/en...-(links-added)

A link re: some modern problems for chess:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/en...e-g-computers)