As we come out of lockdown, how much FIDE rated chess was played in June 2020?

Question

I asked a similar question about chess during lockdown. Now that some countries are coming out of lockdown and chess is resuming FIDE has published data for June.

NB I looked at May data and as far as I could tell FIDE just repeated the April tournament data with updates from federations for corrections to previous data and new registrations but no new tournament data. The June data does contain new tournament data.

What does the June data tell us about chess coming out of lockdown?

Specifically:

1. How many games (or half-games) of FIDE rated chess (standard, rapid and blitz) were played in June, by country?
2. How many players from which countries played FIDE rated chess (standard, rapid and blitz) in June?
3. How does this compare with the same data for June 2019 for total game counts and total player counts? (Break down by country would be too much)

These statistics should give us some idea what progress is being made and how much further we have to go to get back close to normal.

Answer 1

I downloaded the latest July 2020 rating list and loaded the data into my database and ran a few queries.

First one to show the number of players who played standard, rapid or blitz per federation sorted by standard players descending. I also included the number of active players in the federation to give an idea of which federations were more active. I excluded federations where the number of players playing was less than 4 on the grounds that they were likely living and playing in other federations. That still gave an impressive list of 33 federations which look as if they are back playing chess.

Code ActivePlayers Standard Rapid Blitz
CZE 10838 2543 17 16
SVK 6704 1357 54 0
SWE 5331 449 1 0
CRO 7654 351 14 54
GRE 20595 338 0 0
DEN 5496 134 0 0
SRB 7436 112 75 69
ISR 4104 96 0 1
NOR 5165 93 0 0
POL 21407 85 38 40
HUN 7928 80 6 1
LAT 2758 69 86 99
MNE 822 69 0 0
SUI 3170 66 6 1
BUL 3038 60 1 0
ISL 1842 36 54 60
FIN 1308 36 0 0
LTU 3813 32 59 22
SLO 4320 31 44 82
NCA 712 23 0 39
GER 22613 22 1 2
EST 1517 22 0 6
BEL 5602 14 0 1
RUS 68077 8 3 1
ITA 18332 6 10 1
AUT 5640 4 2 0
UKR 11853 4 2 22
FRA 55783 4 1 2
TUR 36523 4 0 0
ESP 45444 4 0 1
IRQ 1515 2 47 0
THA 1082 0 14 0
KGZ 2688 0 10 0

What stands out as quite remarkable in that list is that over 20% of Czech and Slovak active players played last month!

Next a query to show the sum of standard players, rapid players and blitz players.

That gave for June 2020:

Standard = 6171
Rapid = 551
Blitz = 524

By comparison for June 2019:

Standard = 35708
Rapid = 18712
Blitz = 10569

Two things stand out

1. More than 60% of standard chess played in June 2020 was played in the Czech and Slovak republics
2. Standard accounted for far more of the chess played in June 2020 than in June 2019.

Next a query to show the sum of standard+rapid+blitz games per federation. Here is the top 20. Click on the federation link to see the list of tournaments reported for that federation in June 2020:

Code Total Standard Rapid Blitz
CZE 16002 7899 100 204
SVK 4848 2424 132 0
LAT 2625 599 672 1427
SRB 2097 435 560 1227
CRO 2074 719 80 636
GRE 1834 917 0 0
SLO 1663 138 300 1387
POL 1221 441 401 339
HUN 1213 601 8 11
SWE 1108 554 7 0
ISL 869 93 330 683
NOR 776 388 0 0
DEN 754 377 0 0
LTU 714 230 404 254
BUL 708 354 9 0
MNE 606 303 0 0
NCA 575 167 0 241
SUI 503 246 36 11
EST 354 144 0 66
ISR 319 155 0 9

The sum of games for June 2020:

Standard = 17562
Rapid = 3774
Blitz = 6844

For comparison the same figures for June 2019:

Standard = 247057
Rapid = 148693
Blitz = 121143

Digging deeper into the data for the Czech republic, you can see the tournaments reported for
June 2020 for the Czech Republic here and for
June 2019 for the Czech Republic here

43 Czech tournaments reported in June 2020 against 21 in June 2019. It looks very much like in June they aimed to catch up with all the matches and tournaments they missed during the lockdown.