interesting article, thank you!

Thanks-great info!

Hello,

Please add Tunisia

it has 2 GM

also 3 International Master

Loved the article - Thanks!

I wonder how many Russian school children lose in four moves at their youth tournaments. I suspect far fewer than in the United States. There are many ways to measure chess strength in national terms:

ratio of titled players to population

ratio of titled players to active tournament players

average chess rating

quality of play of the players at the median rating

I suspect that the median player in the United States would lose consistently to the median player in almost every other country.

 Thanks Bill. Interesting post.

The country rank of the top 10 came from FIDE.  It is actually the average rating of the top 10 in that country.  The entire list is at

http://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml

A list of countries that are members of FIDE is located here:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/country.htm

Statistics are fascinating (as Dozy wrote), and this is very interesting. The ten top strongest countries statement is uncertain. There is the number of grandmasters but there isn't the number of population. Example in Hungary one GM is between 250,000 people, in Russia this is between 805,000 and in USA this is between 4,230,000. In Ukraine 753,000 people must to a GM. Which is the ten top strongest countries? You might calculate. Just don't forget the results of Olympiade. This is the statistics.

I think the GM to IM ratio is a quirk of fate.  For years, the USA also had more GMs than IMs.  I think the other countries will catch up and soon have more IMs than GMs as more people play and get titled. 

One would naturally assume that the ratio between GMs and IMs within a country would align somewhat the way it does in the US or Russia, (or Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, India) about 1:2 or 1:3. But some of the cited top 10 countries have ratios that surprised me. China and Azerbaijan have more GMs (approaching a reverse ratio to previously mentioned group) than IMs while Armenia has an equal number.  Is this just a quirk of fate or do you suppose there are some underlying reasons?

Statistics, well-presented, are always fascinating—and these are very well presented.

It's interesting that the countries represented by chess.com members is far greater than those recognised by the UN or the USA ... and significant that our registered members total 1 in 1750 of the world's chess playing population. If I stay here long enough I'm likely to meet everybody in the world worth meeting—that is, all the other chess players!

But the most interesting figure for me was the comment that you, personally, have played people from 82 different countries during the past twelve months. It's a factor I never considered in my own games and when I find time to go back through them I'll do a count.

I've been playing on line now for about eight years and one of the things I had noticed was the diversity of my opponents in location and occupation. I've played Russian lawyers, Chinese soldiers, Antarctic scientists, musicians, artists, teachers, miners, cleaners, one Hungarian IM, a bunch of retirees and a whole passel of school kids. (I haven't played any other telegraphists yet . Maybe I'm the only one left...)

Your listing of the top chess nations was also food for thought. I would have expected Hungary and the USA to be further up the list although China, despite their comparatively lower number of GMs, is no surprise. Probably the break-up of the USSR and the diaspora of Soviet GMs has had a lot to do with the realignment of the chess powers

Thanks for an entertaining—and thought-provoking—post.

great article

Those are some staggering numbers!

ADK