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<P>Regarding the difference in popularity between Shogi, the least popular of the top three, and Korean Chess, let me quote from David Pritchard's <I>Encyclopedia of Chess Variants</I>. First, regarding Korean Chess, he says, 'It is not widely played, and there is very little literature. The first changgi association was formed in Korea in 1956' (164). Regarding Shogi, he says, 'Shogi flourished during the Tokugawa shogunate, lapsed briefly during the Meiji restoration (1868) but is now Japan's most popular game with estimates of between 10 and 20 million who are familiar with the rules, of whom perhaps a million are players. The Nihon Shogi Remmei (Japan Shogi Federation), formed in 1927, regulates the game' (269).</P> <P>Gregory Stong has offered a more precise definition of the top tier, which he claims will let in Korean Chess. It says:</P> <BLOCKQUOTE> A game that is played exactly in its current form by at least one million people, and has been played by at least one million people for at least one hundred years. </BLOCKQUOTE> <P>Given what Pritchard has written, I doubt that Korean Chess meets this definition. Given that Japan is much more populous than Korea, that Shogi is the most popular game in Japan while Go is the most popular game in Korea, and that Pritchard still estimates that only about one million Japanese play Shogi, it seems highly probable that significantly less than one million Koreans play Korean Chess.</P> <P>As for this particular definition, I think it is too open to borderline cases. In particular, it may make Shogi a borderline case. This is because it is hard to measure exactly how many people are playing Shogi, but it seems close to the one million mark. I favor a definition that refers to the dominance of a CV in nations. To count as Classic, a game should be the dominant CV in some of the world's most populous nations or in many nations whose total population equals or exceeds some of the world's most populous nations. Xiangqi is dominant in the most populous nation, Shogi in the tenth most populous nation, and Chess in all or most of the nations between China and Japan in population. In contrast, Korean Chess is dominant only in two nations, North and South Korea, whose combined population would rank between 15th (Egypt) and 16th place (Iran).</P> <P>Another criterion I think is worth adding is that a Classic CV should stand out as very different from any CV with greater world dominance. Chess, Shogi, and Xiangqi are all very different from each other, but Korean Chess is too derivative of Xiangqi, whose dominance is much greater. Likewise, Makruk and Sittuyin, which are even less dominant than Korean Chess, are too similar to Chess. Therefore, I think the Classics tier should be limited to Chess, Xiangqi, and Shogi.</P>