Chess articles of any kind: games, tournament reports, web sites, ... |
February 05, 20042003 in numbers (part II)Today I have prepared a statistical review of 2003 regarding games played in Advanced Chess League. Having added some experience from the previous article 2003 in numbers (part I) which presented HCL games, I believe that I have a lot of noticeable things to say. I use two formats to express final results: Advanced Chess League Games, moves, results In 2003 the PlayChess site hosted 2272 completed games by 471 players. Compared to HCL, since players have access to both categories, less than 16% have tried to team up with a chess engine (I have not taken into account those playing only ACL games). The number of games is less than 7% of the games played in HCL. PlayChess members need some encouragement to participate in ACL tournaments. In the near future I am going to dedicate a lot of articles upon this topic. White scored 52%. In detail the results were +910=542-820. When we examine each tournament class separately we find that the results do not vary more than 2 cents from the average. The following pie shows distribution of games over tournament class. You can see that Thematic tournaments are very popular. In ACL the number of games in 2003 for this class was 604 compared to 1312 in HCL. Many players use their computer in order to research a certain opening and its possibilities, or they experiment with their computer upon a known (though not so common most of the times) opening theme. Caissa has 209 games, Blitzmich has 168, and Goofy is third with 156 games. There is a game that ended in move 3, only because one of the opponents abandoned the effort (a game from the Swiss tournament). There are also 6 games that ended in move 5, only one of them with checkmate and another one with a "mate in 4" position. The longest game was ACL-M009-30 between Lindam and unconnected, lasted 102 moves, the final move giving the point with checkmate to Lindam. 71 games ended with early draws (less than 20 moves). First move choice 1285 games started with 1.e4, 670 with 1.d4, 87 with 1.c4, 93 with 1.Nf3 and 137 with one of the remaining moves. This final category includes lots of the thematic games with unusual first move. The pie representing these results is almost identical to the one you can find in the HCL article 2003 in numbers (part I). A little more about first move choice: 1.e4 or 1.d4? In the HCL article I used as reference games from OTB databases since 1990 with both players over 2400 ELO. This time I limited the range to games from the same period with both players over 2500 ELO. To my surprise 1.d4 is more popular than 1.e4. Bar labeled “TEST” in the following graph shows exactly this: Each bar compares 1.e4 (orange) to 1.d4 (blue) only, (100% represents total of 1.e4 plus 1.d4) for each tournament class. The “T” bar shows that Thematic tournaments announced by PlayChess prefer King Pawn openings rather that Queen Pawn openings. Don’t blame Thomas for this. He has also created tournaments for Grob’s Attack (1.g4), Sokolsky opening (1.b4) and From’s Gambit (1.f4 e5 2.fxe5 d6 3.exd6) especially for the ACL addicts. You can see that more experienced players (bars "E" and "M") trust 1.d4 more than players from A and B class. The "S" Swiss tournament bar shows that 73% opened with 1.e4 (compared to the total of 1.e4 and 1.d4). This result is higher than the average from A, B, E and M classes (63%). In order to provide a more accurate result, I should have taken into account the tournament class for all players with White in every single finished game. Sorry, I cannot do this. I simply conclude that the Swiss tournament affects our style from the very first move. Openings It has been very difficult to get any results about opening preferences. The database is small (2272 games) and for every ECO code with a number of games exceeding 40, most of them come from Thematic tournaments. I can only mention two openings: The following graph presents most popular openings (Thematic games are included). If there are any players who wish to know more about the Queen Gambit games I can only recommend to play games with these openings in the ACL to enrich our statistical knowledge. I compared the results for the above openings to the results of OTB games with the same openings. In all cases in OTB tournaments White scores approximately 55%. In ACL we have the same results for the French defense and Ruy Lopez. The Caro – Kann games favor White in the Swiss, E and M tournaments with a score up to 60%, while only 47% in the A and B tournaments. The Sicilian games favor Black in all cases. White scores no more than 43% in all classes. Comments
|
Links
Find articles
Archives
January 2007
December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 June 2004 May 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 Categories
Chess news
Chess philosophy Chess puzzles Community Recognition Game analysis Interviews PlayChess Open Stories Tips and tricks Tournament reports Recent Entries
Spotlight on Class M - December 2006
December 2006 Recognition Spotlight on Class E - November 2006 Thoughts upon a position: 8. The deciding move November 2006 Thoughts upon a position: 7. A Greek gem Thoughts upon a position: 6. Strong Combinational Vision Recent Comments
|