Chess960: USA, Russia, Turkmenistan

We have a fifth Saturday this month, so let's have an extra chess960 post on this blog. A few months ago, Blogger.com, the service that I use to maintain the blog, changed its user interface. One of the improvements was a new look for its reporting of statistics.

Five years ago I wrote an article titled Fischer Chess in the Year 2015, where I included a chart showing countries of origin for visitors to this blog. The image below shows similar in the form of a pie chart.

'Last 12 Months'

While I was preparing this chart, my first question was about the third country on the list: 'Where's Turkmenistan?'. I quickly learned that it's on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea, opposite Azerbaijan on the western side. My second question was: 'Why Turkmenistan?'. This I was unable to answer -- not even a clue.

As for the other countries, the position of the U.S. and Russia as no.1 and no.2 confirms the chart from 2015. Given that 45% of visits to the blog are from those two countries, there is plenty of room for an increase in the percentages of other countries.