January 08, 2004

2003 in numbers (part I)

Happy New Year everyone! I have collected some statistical data from HCL and ACL databases. Here are the details regarding HCL:


Human Chess League


Games, moves, results

In 2003 the playchess site hosted 33950 completed games by 2964 players.
White scored 52% (15464 White wins, 4470 draws, 14018 Black wins).

cccmember has 1185 games in C, B, A and E and Thematic categories.
footyhead comes second with 665.

7072 games were played in A class tournaments, 9110 in B, 8868 in C, 4751 in E, 2837 in M and 1312 in thematic tournaments. Here is a graphical representation of this result:

games per tournament class

HCL-A616-36 between Flanker and ETC_Chess lasted 127 moves and ended in a draw.

63 games lasted only 5 moves, though only 10 out of those ended with checkmate. There is a private game with a checkmate in only 3 moves; more about it and a lot of entertaining ?miniatures? in a future article.

586 games ended with early draws (less than 20 moves).


Openings

20388 games started with 1.e4, 8477 with 1.d4, 1495 with 1.c4 and
1443 started with 1.Nf3.

Irregular openings (ECO A00; that is also excluding 1.b3 and 1.f4 from the above list) are a total of 1387 games.

first move statistics in playchess and professional chess
The left pie represents opening first move in PlayChess games. The right pie represents opening first move in games across the world since 1990, with both players over 2400 ELO. As you can see, PlayChess players prefer King Pawn?s openings more than anything else.

5074 games follow the Sicilian defense (B20-B99). Most popular variation is the B30 Nimzowitsch-Rossolimo attack 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 with 357 games and the B22 Alapin variation 1.e4 c5 2.c3 with 335.

The French defense (C00-C19) has 2605 games, 604 of which follow the C02 advance variation 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.e5

Games with 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 (C50-C59) have a total of 1557 games.

The following diagrams show the most popular openings:


openings in Human Chess League

Philidor?s defense (C41) is very very popular in PlayChess. It is a very good opening, to begin opening studies. I have already played 4 games (3 as Black) with this line in my earlier B and C class days in this site. With a closer look I discovered that more experienced players do not prefer this opening.

percentage of C41 per class

The graph above represents games with Philidor?s defense as a percentage of total games played in each category.

The results of a C41 game also vary in tournaments of different categories.

C41 results percentage per class

The first five bars of the graph above show the result of the games in each class, the next bar shows the result across all HCL games. The far right bar represents the score of C41 games, with at least one player over 2400 ELO, from a commercial database. Members of PlayChess tend to draw in less games with this opening than professional chess players, who avoid to play 2?d6 after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 because of the low success rate.

A similar research is possible for every opening. However I decided to present here, as a sample, the Advance variation of French defense (C02). I have tried the line twice and then abandoned it in favor of Tarrasch variation 3.Nd2, because I realized that it would not be easy to score a point against a more experienced opponent. The following graphs follow the same convention as above.

percentage of C02 per class

C02 results percentage per class

As you can see this line appears more frequently in M class tournaments. Surprisingly the potential of a draw result is higher than in professional chess. In lower categories, White cannot take full advantage of the 3.e5 move. Black dominates the game.


Special thanks to Kounoupidi who contributed to the concept and realization of this article.

Posted by Michalis Kaloumenos at January 8, 2004 07:09 PM
Comments

Something wrong with the "Percentage of C41 (or C02) per class."
It shows percentages in the thousands.

Posted by: Dennis at January 8, 2004 10:14 PM

Hi Dennis,

It's a decimal "," instead of the (American) decimal ".". So C41 is played in a little over 5% of the games in class C, about 3.5% in class B etc.

Remember, this is a European site ;-))

Ezechiel/Michael

Posted by: Ezechiel at January 8, 2004 10:57 PM

Thanks for the effort!

Posted by: Coolhandluke at January 9, 2004 12:09 AM

I try to be cosmopolitan, I really really do. But there's just so much damned stuff to remember.

Thanks for setting me straight.
-djpnola

Posted by: Dennis at January 9, 2004 04:43 AM

Michalis you are an encyclopedia of wonderfully maybe useful information :-)). You have given me many a headache on the chess board and now my little brain aches with all these statistics. I take my hat off to you for your selfess efforts to enhance our experiences here at PlayChess. Thank You!

Posted by: PamperedPawn at January 9, 2004 08:14 AM

Very interesting stuff. Nice page!

Posted by: Patrick Harlin at January 9, 2004 01:24 PM

I am curious how many plays 1. f4 and its variations... is it possible to present it in your next article?
Otherwise this is a wonderful piece of article. Bravo!

Posted by: Rygars at January 9, 2004 03:24 PM

For those who seek mistakes, there is one in the graph with openings. "Ruy Lopez" bar ends before 1800, but the total games mentioned are 1995. Don't ask my how I did this! The number 1995 is the correct figure.

Posted by: Michalis Kaloumenos at January 9, 2004 04:55 PM

IT is good to see anlysis here, it kind of gives people a picture of the big picture, more of the same please :)

Posted by: Richard Gill at January 9, 2004 05:16 PM


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