From: "Manabu, Terao" LYCOS NE JP> Date: 5 mar 2000 Subject: The number of potential shogi players(Was:Re: The number of chess Thanks for Dr. Danerud, Jonathan, Marc, Alexander & and anyone that replied me directly and sorry for not responding quickly and one by one. As to the number of casual chess players, The highest number is given by Alexander - everybody know rules(In Russia) The lowest is given by Dr. Danerud - 1% of Total World Population Interesting estimation is given by Jonathan - 50 times as many as registered players But Let me use Marc's number(Casual Player - 5% of population) and apply it to worldwide. Now the population on this planet is 6 billion. Then the number of casual chess player in the world is to be 300 million. If 10% of them become shogi player, there will be 30 million shogi player outside Japan. It sounds like just a dream, but let me continue a bit. According to the latest survey conducted by "Yoka Kaihatsu Center" (Literally, Leasure Developping Center, I'm not sure this is the correct translation of the organization), the number of shogi players who play at least one game a year in Japan is 10.6% of the people aged at 15 year old or older which means 11.4 million persons. (It's rather difficult to have the number of 'registered ' shogi player in Japan since we don't usually use the concept of 'registered' and 'casual'.) They have 11.9 occasions to play shogi per year and they expense 600yen(Approx. US$6.00 or Euro6.00) for shogi equipment and 700yen for entry fee or so per head a year on average. The expense does not seem to contain paying for shogi contents such as books, magazines, TV programs, computer programs or so. More than 50 new books on shogi are published every year. One weekly commercial paper(Shukan Shogi) and three monthly commercial magazines(ShogiSekai, Kindai Shogi & NHK Shogi Textbook) survive. One CS TV channel specializes in shogi & go to broadcast shogi/go programs from morning to evening. This is the reality in Japan based on the number of the 11.4 million persons who play at least a game a year. If the consensus is made that the shogi population outside Japan will sooner or later reach 30 million, almost all shogi contents are motivated to be translate into Western languages such as English since the market size outside Japan is 3 times as large as that of Japan which translation must pay. As to price issue of standard shogi set raised by Dr. Danerud, I will spread your recognition to whomever I find necessary to do so. Regards Manabu Terao Get your FREE, private e-mail account at http://mailcity.lycos.ne.jp