8.3 Which nations have the best chess players?

For much of the twentieth century, the USSR was the strongest chess nation. Over the last thirty years the game has become popular in other nations and it is surprising, which were the largest chess playing nations in December 2020, measured by the number of active rated players. Figure 8.11 shows the 30 chess federations with the highest numbers. The rest are combined into the group ‘Other’. Countries are coloured by region, using the classification and colours of the World Bank (Worldbank (2020)).

Figure 8.11: Numbers of active rated players by country

Not only is Russia not the country with the most active rated players, there are four other countries with more: Spain, France, Germany, and India. The increased popularity of chess in India is surely due to Anand being undisputed World Chess Champion from 2007 to 2013. The United States is only 15th in the list and most of the top 30 countries are European. Iran stands out in 6th position. The fact that the ‘Other’ group is so large underlines the spread of the game across the world.

Countries are of very different population sizes and other ways of looking at chess-playing strength include the number of active rated players per million population and the number of active grandmasters per million population. These statistics tend to pick out countries with small populations. Instead we can look at how the number of Grandmasters is related to the number of players. Figure 8.12 plots both with bubbles drawn for each country proportional to their population sizes. Only countries with a population of at least one million are included. Russia is the country at the top with far more Grandmasters than any other. The other four countries to the right are India (large in blue), Germany, France, and Spain. China and the USA are the big countries to the left with many grandmasters and relatively few rated players.

Figure 8.12: Grandmasters and active rated players per million population, where circle areas are proportional to country population sizes

Another approach is to look at rating distributions for individual countries. Figure 8.13 shows boxplots of ratings for all countries with more than 3000 active players ordered by their medians. Boxplot widths have been drawn related to numbers of players and the countries coloured again by region.

Figure 8.13: Chess ratings of active players for countries with over 3000 active

Serbia and the Netherlands have the highest median values and also some low outliers implying they have fewer players with low ratings. Perhaps different countries have different policies concerning registering players with official ratings. As in Figure 8.11, you can see that Spain, France, Germany, India, and Russia have the most active players and the German players look stronger in general. India has many players, but is the weakest of the big nations, possibly because chess has developed in popularity only recently there. The US has the highest rated player in this display, even though they are one of the smaller countries in terms of the number of active registered players. Norway, the home of the World’s top player, Magnus Carlsen, does not have enough registered players to appear in this chart.