Rated players by country

[Roger de Coverly]

ChessBase have a new graphical presentation on this.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/visual-pre ... ss-ratings

You have to take such statistics with a pinch of salt, since the presence of players on the FIDE list can very much depend on whether the structure of national chess and the domestic, if any, rating system is conducive to players obtaining International ratings. This accounts for the under representation of the USA and to a lesser extent the UK.

In many countries, UK included, it's a top down process, so that the likelihood of a player having both a domestic and international rating increases with the ranking of the player. This can be seen in the mean and median in that the International ratings centralise at around the 1900 mark. If the rating system had fully matured to include nearly all active players of any sort of standard, you might expect it to centralise in the 1500 to 1700 range.

[Martin Crichton]

It is believable that the average FIDE rated player has a grade of 2025. Only 20 years ago to even get on the rating list you had to get a grade of 2200. (now it's 1000 - more money for FIDE)