Top Chess Players

Context

Relative chess skill level is measured by Elo rating. The International Chess Federation, FIDE, acts as the governing body for international chess. FIDE assigns Elo ratings for three speeds of chess (in ascending order): Standard, Rapid, and Blitz. They also award various titles, based on both rating and performance.

Content

This dataset contains information on 746 active chess players whose Standard FIDE ratings were at least 2500 (as of September 2020).
The 2500 minimum was chosen to match the peak rating requirement for the Grandmaster (GM) title.
The information includes a player's: Name, Title, Country, Standard Rating, Rapid Rating, Blitz Rating, and Birth Year.

Acknowledgements

This dataset was inspired by a similar dataset: Top Women Chess Players.
The data was scraped from FIDE's website: https://newratings.fide.com/.

Inspiration

As a lifetime chess player, I have always been interested in data about other players, especially strong ones.
With this data, I wanted to provide avenues to answer questions like:

• What is the relationship between country and rating?
• What is the age distribution of top players?
• What is the relationship between rating categories?
• What is the relationship between rating categories and age?

Improvements

This dataset could be improved in numerous ways, including by:

• Tracking the number of games each player has played (per rating category)
• Tracking Rapid/Blitz rating history
• Tracking Standard rating history
• Adding a gender column
• Adding inactive players
• Lowering the minimum rating threshold