President of the German Chess Federation (DSB), Paul Meyer-Dunker, shared his thoughts on chess in Germany in an interview with ChessBase India. Paul believes that Germany lacks confidence in presenting its chess internationally. Meyer-Dunker notes the gap between the number of online and over-the-board players.

Paul Meyer-Dunker

Paul Meyer-Dunker

President of the German Chess Federation

“In general, the view on chess in Germany is very positive. But what we need to work on is to be more confident, frankly spoken.

Because we are a big chess country and we have a lot of chess players. But we are not often very confident in presenting our sport, being proud of our sport, and actually having the confidence and the self-esteem about how big and important we are and could be.

We have 100,000 registered chess players and 2,200 chess clubs in Germany. We are one of the biggest non-Olympic sport federations in Germany. And that means something. But we always tend to make ourselves smaller than we are. That’s also a thing I want to change.

Besides that, I think chess in Germany in general is a huge thing. We actually looked at the numbers: three and a half million people in Germany play online weekly, and we have 100,000 registered members. So, there’s a gap, but also a huge potential.

Because people that play chess weekly, that is a huge target group that we can look at to involve more. Those are people that are interested in chess, and that’s a lot to work with.

We have great players and a lot of clubs and good infrastructure. And now I think it’s just important that we ramp it up a bit more as a federation, to maybe use a different picture.”

Germany ranks 5th in the FIDE federation ratings. The average rating of Germany’s top 10 players is 2629 points. World’s No. 6 and No. 52 Vincent Keymer and Matthias Bluebaum are two of the most prominent German chess players.

Credit: Finn Engesser