Thinking Allowed

Enjoyed my chat about chess with Laurie Taylor and Gary Fine on yesterday's (16 December 2015) BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed. Laurie was a very affable and relaxed host, and I enjoyed his company. I also enjoyed meeting Professor Simon Down of Anglia Ruskin University, who was the guest for the first part of the programme.

It looks as if the programme will be available indefinitely online as an MP3 download. So if the above link fails to work after a time, you could try downloading the MP3 version here. The chess content starts around 12 minutes into the show.

I am very grateful to all four UK chess federations (English Chess Federation, Chess Scotland, Welsh Chess Union, Ulster Chess Union) for their prompt and helpful responses to my request for figures of active competitive players in their respective countries. For the record, the figures I quoted on the programme were 20,000 currently active and/or registered competition chess players in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland combined, and 48,200 schoolchildren who competed in the 2015 Delancey UK Schools Chess Challenge (I found the figure here in the 2016 entry form). As I said on the programme, there will be an overlap between the two figures which is not readily quantifiable.

Other links:

Laurie Taylor on Wikipedia

Gary Alan Fine on Wikipedia

Profile of Professor Simon Down