LeeRoth wrote on 12/03/17 at 20:00:49:

Yes, interesting. The "chess export" table shows France, Germany, Czech Republic and Spain are the consistent top destination countries for chess travelers (with Russia, Greece and Italy also in contention some years).

I would have guessed the same four top countries, but a bit surprised France is no. 1. I need to finally play a tournament there!

Among the countries I've played in, I've found both Germany and the Czech Republic offer a nice combination of many and strong open tournaments along with opportunities for affordable accomodation and travel. I also tried Poland a couple of times, thinking it would be much the same. But I faced way too many strong and underrated junior players there, so I have yet to manage a good performance in Poland...

P.S.: The open tournament counts in that article have to be seriously inflated. I think they may have included local club tournaments as "open" and counted each rating group in a tournament as separate tourmanents to reach such numbers.

BigTy wrote on 11/30/17 at 07:05:04:

Is this not the same thing? Naturally a country with a large amount of OTB tournaments, strong clubs, a high % of the population being chess players, etc, will produce the best players?