How the world's Elo is distributed
Every rated player on the FIDE list, grouped into 100-point rating bands. The long right tail is the point: titles live out there, but almost nobody does.
The world's top 20 right now
Highest active standard ratings on the list. Players FIDE marks inactive (Kasparov still sits at 2812) are excluded.
Standouts
The leader on each measure, computed from this dataset. Where a measure would otherwise be won by a handful of players in a tiny federation, the minimum sample is stated. Tap a row for that country.
Which regions hold the rated players
Rated players and elite depth by World Bank region. Europe's share of rated players is the single biggest fact in this dataset.
These filters scope every chart and table on this tab, the Per capita tab and the Breakdowns tab.
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Depth versus peak
A country's top-10 average against its top-50 average. Countries far below the diagonal have a thin elite — a few strong players and a steep drop behind them. Tap any point for the country.
Population against rated players
Both axes are logarithmic. The diagonal guides are constant rates — 1, 10 and 100 rated players per 100,000 people. Colour is elite strength (top-10 average), so you can see that chess density and chess strength are not the same thing.
Rated players per 100,000 people
How deeply organised chess has penetrated the population.
Grandmasters per million people
Elite production relative to size. Small federations dominate this one.
Wealth against chess density
GDP per capita (PPP, log scale) against rated players per 100,000. Money buys some chess participation, but the spread at every income level is enormous — the Balkans and the Caucasus sit far above their income peers.
Title pyramids
Where the titled players are, split by title. Women's titles (WGM/WIM/WFM/WCM) are counted with their open-title equivalents in the totals but shown separately in the table.
Who is playing, by age
Share of each country's rated players in each age band. Select a country to compare it against the world.
Strength by age band
Mean rating within each age band, for the same country, in age order. The dip at the young end is a pipeline, not a weakness — juniors enter the list underrated. The scale does not start at zero, so the axis is labelled.
The gender gap
Women as a share of each country's rated players. The world figure is around 11%; no federation of any size is near parity.
Junior pipeline
Rated players under 18 per 100,000 people — the clearest forward-looking indicator in the dataset, since today's juniors are the next decade's top-10 average.
Over the board against online
FIDE top-10 average (over the board) against the Chess.com blitz top-10 average for the same country's titled players. Online blitz ratings run on a different scale to FIDE Elo, so read the pattern, not the gap.
Every federation, every metric
The complete dataset behind every chart in this page. Tap a column heading to sort. Scoped by the filters on the Rankings tab.