26 October 2013

Chess960 Interest on Chess.com

Here's a neat graphic from Chess.com, Players - Online Chess, showing the chess960 rating distribution.

The data on the side says,

Players: 69.831
Average Rating: 1304
Average Glicko RD: 123
White Wins: 49.4%
Black Wins: 46.9%
Draws: 3.7%

That compares to 343.252 players of 'standard' chess (traditional chess, SP518 RNBQKBNR). These numbers are all for 'turn-based' chess, i.e. correspondence chess.

The numbers of players for 'live' chess, i.e. crossboard chess, are

Bullet: 520.896
Blitz: 1.422.635
Standard: 723.394

It's not surprising that the player count for chess960 is the smallest of the five playing categories. Even so, it's roughly equivalent to total USCF membership.

2 comments:

GeneM said...

A couple years ago on the USCF forums, I lamented that the USCF did not put effort into developing web-based real-time rated play (at time-controls longer than Blitz, maybe more like Game/60min + 10sec Increment).

I said something like - "The vast majority of chess games are played in the USA each Tuesday occur on websites like Chess.com, far more than occur at USCF rated games on a weekend".
Another forum person doubted that claim; and I had no hard data I could cite.
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I cannot determine from this graph that Mark has posted - Over what length of time were these PLAYER numbers accumulated?
Mark's statement that contrasts to the number of USCF members puts some interesting perspective on these numbers.

And how many 'Standard' time-control (non-Blitz, non-speed) chess GAMES have been played on Chess.com in the past 12 months?
And how many chess960 games in the past 12 months?

HarryO said...

Thanks to Chess.com finally we are starting to see some glimpses of Chess960 Fischer Random becoming more mainstream:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/announcing-the-grandmaster-blitz-battles-championship

Notice too, that the level of criticism of Chess960 on the forums around the world is declining. Here is but one example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/4cq956/aroniangrischuk_blitz_battle_opener_april_6_once/

There is still a long way to go though.