(A short English summary is given below!)
 Short summary of Arne van Mourik's article, including some additional comments, written by the webmaster
Save the tradition of draughts and chess
Unfortunately, 90% of draught columns in newspapers and other journals
has been disappeard. While these colums were (and are) of great value (New impuls for draughts and chess) to inspire our youngsters to start draughts, both by playing games and composing problems. Action is required of the Draughts Societies to look for alternatives in order to recrute new youngsters and to make them enthousiastic for both draught game and draught composing activities. One of these will be a much more attention to on-line draughts platforms as websites, facebook, twitter etc. In particular, interests in draughts is declining in Europe. China, Brasil, Africa and Asia are more and more taking over the tradionally dominant position of the Netherlands, Russia and the Baltic States. "How come?", that's the main question and worry for the Europeans. So, a serious self-investigation about that "How?" is urgently required to come to the right answer and ... solution. Apart from the fact that our next generations are less paper-minded, digital pages have the great advantage of presenting moving diagrams! Finally, can we still imagine that a draughts world champion will be elected as "sportsman or -woman of the year"? In the Netherlands, this has been happened in 1948 to our world champion draughts Piet Roozenburg! Tom Kieboom
Arne van Mourik also had a radio interview about this article on January 24, 2015: click here to listen (although it is in Dutch)
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