World Chess Championship in charts

Magnus Carlsen continued to assert his dominance at the World Chess Championship. FiveThirtyEight broke down Carlsen’s dominance in the final match with Ian Nepomniachtchi with a series of difference charts. In the quick view, you see it was either a draw or a Carlsen win over 11 games.

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Where chess pieces are most often captured

Reddit user desfirsit made heatmaps to show where on the chess board pieces are usually captured. The top two rows are for black pieces, and the bottom row is for white pieces.

I’m no chess player, but this seems to look right? The frequency of captures appears to agree with movement patterns. Although I’m surprised that the queen, despite having the most freedom of movement, is often captured in the same place. But like I said, I’m no chess player.

You can grab the data from Lichess, which provides data for millions of chess games.

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Where chess pieces are most often captured

Reddit user desfirsit made heatmaps to show where on the chess board pieces are usually captured. The top two rows are for black pieces, and the bottom row is for white pieces.

I’m no chess player, but this seems to look right? The frequency of captures appears to agree with movement patterns. Although I’m surprised that the queen, despite having the most freedom of movement, is often captured in the same place. But like I said, I’m no chess player.

You can grab the data from Lichess, which provides data for millions of chess games.

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Play chess against the machine and see what it’s thinking

Thinking Machine

The Thinking Machine, by Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, shows you the thought process of a computer trying to win at chess. There have been several iterations that date back to 2002, but the most recent iteration was built for modern browsers and you can play against the computer.

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Chess piece moving patterns

White knight

Million Base is a database of 2.2 million chess games. Steve Tung visualized chess piece journeys based on this data, for each piece on the board. Above is the footprint for the white knight. Each thin line represents 500 moves, and from what looks like a little bit of random noise to offset each line, you see a more prominent path for more frequent hops.

Of course, because of starting points and game rules, there's a unique pattern for each piece.

Here's the black queen, which relatively more board coverage than others:

Black Queen

The white king, which is more limited in movement:

White King

In contrast, here's the black pawn that starts in position b7.

Black Pawn

See the paths of all the pieces. [Thanks @networkstudies]

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Posted by in chess, Mapping

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Chess piece survival rates

Chess survival rates

On Quora, someone asked, "What are the chances of survival of individual chess pieces in average games?" Oliver Brennan answered by looking at the moves from 2.2 million games.

The situation with the c-d-e pawns is very interesting. The most survivable central pawn is the White c-pawn (42%), while White's d-pawn is the most doomed of all the chessmen (24%) - more so even than the knights (~26%). There's a pleasing symmetry in the survival rates of the White and Black c- and e-pawns that suggests they're frequently exchanged on the d-file. Bishops survive around 35% of the time, with the kingside bishops slightly more likely to survive than queenside ones.

Code available if you want to poke. [via Know More]

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