MARK CAPRON IS NUMBER 20!

Former Chess Festival attendee Mark Capron (Iowa City) is coming .He said the latest brochure (emailed yesterday) hooked him. What about you? Do I need to try harder? As someone once said (Ed Koch??), "How am I doing?" Mark also wanted the very fine new book by Soltis Studying Chess Made Easy. I think it would have had an even more important title if it had been named, Studying Chess More Focused. Am running low and since their distributor in NY takes forever to get things from, I won't have more until mid-August. Have 2 left now I think.

By the way, I miscounted the number who have registered and corrected it on yesterday's blog. It is now 20. I expect another tomorrow (maybe?), that would bring it to 21, the number I had for last year's event, at the last minute. One of the features of yesterday's emailing was to get sharp youngsters to come, ages 12-20, or "prodigies."

SMALL IDEAS CAN BE BIG IDEAS

Greg Delaney, one of the first to sign up for the Last Chess Clinic (he of Wisconsonite status), suggested I bring some complete sets (at least one for him) of my magazine SQUARES to the Chess Clinic and he could pick them up. Great idea.

It seems like such a small thing and yet it would give others a chance to see what I was putting together some years back. I have a couple dozen small things to do for the Bourse (Sales Table) at the event including trying to find someone who can run it for me so I can more fully participate in the event itself! For those who remember my earlier Chess Festivals I would have one or two people handling sales, my daughter would schmooze people at the door and make sure they were registered and feel welcome. Sometimes I had others do the pairings for quickplay events. In all, it ran pretty smoothly and yet, I still was busy. So busy in fact that I would only hear snippets of what the work-shoppers were teaching to their raptured audience.

If there was an odd number for some lesson-play events I would fill in.

By picking up the 8 magazines at once at the event, you'll save postage because, they ARE heavy. That glossy stock causes that. Ordinarily they would have cost about $80, but I will have some at the Clinic for $30 a set including the scarce #8 (the last one).

Unfortunately, I was informed yesterday that Roger Gottschall's chess event is held in Ames (Iowa) the same weekend as the Last Chess Clinic. I'll miss you Roger. As I recently related, there is no perfect weekend. If I dodge something in Iowa then something in Peoria will hit another weekend, or Kansas City, or Omaha, or Chicago, or Minneapolis, or the World Open. There are lots of chess events in the USA but almost none of them are conducive to commercial sales success.

And as Walter Cronkite would say: "And that's the way it is, July 23rd, 2010... and you were there."

bob@thinkerspressclinic.com