8 Comparing chess players across the board
“A strong memory, concentration, imagination, and a strong will is required to become a great chess player.”
Background FIDE (the International Chess Federation) has used an Elo system since 1970 to rate the relative strengths of chess players based on the results of all official individual games.
Questions What is the distribution of ratings? How does rating change with age? How do the ratings of men and women compare? Which countries have the players with the highest ratings?
Sources FIDE (the International Chess Federation) publishes rating lists of players every month (FIDE (2020)). Country population data for 2019 was taken from the World Bank website (Worldbank (2020)).
Structure The FIDE dataset for December 2020 includes 362502 players with their name, country, rating, and year of birth.