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I did this graph based on 731,000 games played on the free internet chess server by players with rating above 2000 during the last 13 years with non-blitz time controls.
The average length is 79 half moves, the median is 70 and the mode is 51. There are also a lot of very short games due to people resigning early.
Update: As it turns out, the above curve ...
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If you are prepared to use standard Linux command-line tools like wc and grep then I think my free PGN processor, pgn-extract, will do much of the pre-processing necessary to count games in each category. Below is a basic bash script I put together as a proof of concept. It assumes your file of games is called inputfile.pgn - adjust as necessary, or pass it ...
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Brilliant little data mining project!
I used the wiki list of GMs and wrote a quick and dirty script to extract the data. Feel free to use and expand/alter it, if you are interested.
As it turns out, the average age for reaching GM is just above 28. It is, however, skewed by "old" generation players and players from time before GM title was a thing. It was ...
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I think they certainly have increased their ELO, but more importantly, their overall chess strength. ELO is only a rating relative to others in the pool so it may tend to go up more slowly if everyone in the pool gets better, which they have collectively.
First, you need to take an average of the top players, rather than look at just two incredibly special ...
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Probably more often than people realize.
There have been several notable instances where GMs (even world champions) have missed simple mates in one.
From my own experience, when I analyze my games the engine frequently will point out some ridiculous 25 move forced mate. In a game, I'm not going to take the time to calculate something like that out if I have ...
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The maximum number of moves in a chess game is not infinite, it's 11797 plies = 5898 moves and a half. This is due to the fifty-move rule.
So no, the number of possible chess games is not infinite.
The maximum number of legal moves in a position is 218. So a crude upper bound for the number of possible chess games is 218^11797 = 10^27586
Wait, actually ...
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How would say a 1700 rated player of say 50 years ago who is no longer .around go against a 1700 player of today?
Speaking as a player who was around 50 years ago and was rated the equivalent of 1800 in 1973 (my BCF grading was 150 with a generally accepted conversion formula of ELO = BCF x 8 + 600) and is rated 1718 today I'm pretty sure I would beat my 17 ...
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The short answer
Yes, they do, although very few GMs do and by a margin of less than 10%. This does not seem to be due only to random factors (see long answer).
An example is GM Joseph Gallagher. As you can see in his FIDE profile page, he has the following games record (as for 15 Dec. 2020):
White +124 =118 -73, score = 58.1%
Black +126 =124 -67, score = ...
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From this Chess.com Discussion
In terms of games played, it would be Tal with 95 games (46 wins, 49 draws) from October 23, 1973 to October 16, 1974. He also has the second longest streak of 84 games (47 wins, 39 draws) from July 1972 to April 1973.
In terms of time, Capablanca was undefeated for 63 games (40 wins, 23 draws from February 10, 1916 to ...
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It really depends on what counts as a missed checkmate. In Blitz we occasionally see a missed mate in 1. In slower games, mates in a few moves are rarelly missed. But the problem is that sometimes long mate sequences will be "intentionally missed", as the player will go for a solid advatange that guarantees victory rather than calculate a 15-move ...
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Everybody seems to agree that "ELO inflation" is real (I found an article from 20 years ago claiming this exists)...except scientists. Here is a 2011 paper that vehemently denies the phenomenon; the abstract says that only little inflation happens, and the players really get better.
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/7951
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The raw data which could be used to extract this information is available on the FIDE website (from 2001) and the Olimpbase website (before 2001). What you will need to do is clean the data (the older the data the more "dirty" it is), construct a relational database and insert the data. Then you will be able to use SQL to search the database for ...
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Whilst acknowledging the comment by @SmallChess that this is pointless, it is also relatively straightforward to do. I analysed 2,539,871 games from a ChessBase mega database counting the number of moves for the next player to move before each move was played. I did not include the number of moves available after the final move of the game had been played. ...
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I looked at the data briefly and got some interesting conclusions.
I used data from FIDE webpage for january in years 2006-2019.
I calculated each player's rating change in consecutive years and used player's age in the first of the two as the age when this rating change occurred. Then I simply calculated the average. The result is this:
As you can see, ...
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The question is apparently based on a misunderstanding of how ELO ratings work. There is absolutely no mechanism by which the overall increase in players' strength would lead to increase in their ELO. The actual value of the ELO rating bears no meaning; nor does the comparison of ELO at distant times. The only thing that has direct relevance is the ...
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World Champion Tigran Petrosian was known to be almost impossible to beat. He's your man. Study his games and legacy.
Per Wikipedia, he lost 1 out of 129 Olympiad games. Olympiads are top-notch tournaments and the score is over 20 years of play. He's not a flash in the pan.
In his 8 Euroteams competitions (held every three years from 1957 to 1983) he ...
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White scores about 54%, which is quite different from White winning 54% of all game, more so considering how draws occur more often between stronger players.
None of the top players score better as Black, and I doubt there are grandmasters who do. If that were the case, it'd definitely be due to a small sample. I used to have a better score as Black back ...
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I recently looked into that very thing a couple of weeks ago, and found an excellent breakdown on it (just this one, though):
The short answer is that aside from Kings, h2 & h7 are the least likely to be captured pieces (with survival rates claimed to be 73.92% and 72.29%, respectively).
Regarding individual pieces' survival (from a 2,196,968 game ...
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Looks like I am late to the party. Anyway:
Free PGNs of many top players are available here. Almost all 2700+ players are there. As for women, only a few from very top are there. These PGN files have anywhere from few hundred to couple thousand games available for each player. Although this does not fully comply with OPs request, it seems like an ...
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The earliest Armageddon games I can find go back to the Women's World Chess Championship 2001, and the FIDE World Championship in 2002, which GM Ruslan Ponomariov won. This is probably a fairly complete list since Armageddon really only lends itself to knock-out tournaments or matches, and the question did ask primarily about GMs and Armageddon. There might ...
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The simplest answer is "No" because draw offers are not retained. By that I mean that although the players may record draw offers on their scoresheets, that information is thrown away when the games are transcribed and saved.
In all events where norms are possible the organizer has to send the records of the games in electronic (pgn) format to FIDE. When ...
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As I do not have access to the full Lomosonov tablebases, here is an answer based on the Syzygy tablebases, which are available online in machine-readable format. I interpret your question as "how often does the side to move win, lose or draw". As the Syzygy tablebases only include positions where White has material advantage, we have to add the ...
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I think the key of this is number of played games.
Nihalsarin2004 9440 bullet games
konevlad 1113 blitz games
Zhigalko_Sergei 257 rapid games
Biranidun 84 clasic games
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Yes (actually, hell yes).
World class correspondence chess is very close to the infamous "draw death" of chess. If you thought 70-80% draw rate among the world elite at classical chess was bad, check out what it's like at world correspondence chess championship level: 9 decisive games out of 136 played, or about 95% draws.
World class ...
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We have no way of knowing this, chess isn't remotely close to being solved. We only know that as opening theory digs deeper, it finds it harder and harder to find advantages for white, so the game is probably a draw. But that's no proof.
If the game is a draw, then any game that is won by either side must involve at least 1 wrong move. But we don't know ...
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How much statistical difference is there? Is it really statistically significant?
Do these statistics take account of only GM games, so are they biased or not?
And do you know that not every player is a Sicilian expert? Actually, it's quite tough to be a Sicilian expert.
Had I not played the Sicilian with Black I could have saved myself the trouble of ...
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The advantage White gets in a game is so small that it becomes completely irrelevant at low levels.
What is the point of having such edge on your opponent if you at least are going to make an inaccuracy in the opening or middlegame?
Furthermore, in blitz games that small advantage is probably negligible since a greater deal of mistakes are made.
My online ...
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I think this picture describes the situation quite well. It was created from 400k games, and considers only plain piece material.
Source: Pawn Advantage, Win Percentage, and ELO
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Chess isn't popular because all major tournaments make it lack emotion. For some reason, all major tournaments are those of classic chess, that is, with high quality games that last 5 hours or more. The outcome of these high quality games at the highest play level is most typically a draw. This is totally broken and does not have a chance to make it to ...
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Armageddon Chess is a fair tie-break system only if the two players bid for how much time Black should have.
Foolishly most times I see Armageddon specified there is no bidding. Instead the Tournament Organizer gazes into his magic oracle which tells him the exactly correct fair amount of time to give to Black (the T.O. is careful to never let us see the ...
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