Birth year of chess players

General discussions about ratings.
Neill Cooper
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Birth year of chess players

Post by Neill Cooper » Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:44 am

Of the 10105 players in the 2011 with standard play grades, 6250 have dates of birth in the master list. The graph below shows the distribution of ages of the recorded DoB.
I think it fair to assume that most of the unrecorded DOB are pre 1980 as most of those since then will have been recorded when juniors.
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Neill Cooper
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Neill Cooper » Sun Oct 23, 2011 9:11 am

The graph shows that chess is popular at secondary school, but many stop playing graded chess once they leave school. This fits with my own experience.

Chess appears to be less popular with those aged between 20 and 40 - a worrying pattern for the future.

John Swain
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by John Swain » Sun Oct 23, 2011 9:51 am

Interesting statistics, Neill. They confirm a feeling I've had for some time. A little over a year ago, I commented on this forum about the 45+ age pattern of most of the participants, a few juniors excepted, at the 2010 Counties Final (controllers as well as players). I could have said the same thing about the 2011 Counties Final. It's worrying and needs addressing ....

Richard Bates
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Richard Bates » Sun Oct 23, 2011 10:58 am

Neill Cooper wrote:The graph shows that chess is popular at secondary school, but many stop playing graded chess once they leave school. This fits with my own experience.

Chess appears to be less popular with those aged between 20 and 40 - a worrying pattern for the future.
It depends whether this "popularity" is actually consequence of less interest or a preponderance of other priorities at that age bracket. Post 40 is when i imagine a lot of people would return to the game after long periods of absence.

Roger de Coverly
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Roger de Coverly » Sun Oct 23, 2011 11:29 am

Richard Bates wrote: It depends whether this "popularity" is actually consequence of less interest or a preponderance of other priorities at that age bracket. Post 40 is when i imagine a lot of people would return to the game after long periods of absence.
The ECF must have data going back to 1994. So drawing the same graph at some earlier points would be interesting. It would be my impression that the cohort born 1945 to 1965 have been the mainstay of British chess for many, many years.

Alex Holowczak
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Alex Holowczak » Sun Oct 23, 2011 7:50 pm

There is another problem with reliability. As the organiser of the British Universities' Championship, I routinely forget to ask people for their date of birth. This means people of the 18-21 generation in particular may get missed out in the statistics... :oops:

Paul Sanders
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Paul Sanders » Sun Oct 23, 2011 7:55 pm

It would be interesting to see mean ratings per birth year graphed alongside age cohorts...

Neill Cooper
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Neill Cooper » Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:10 pm

Alex Holowczak wrote:There is another problem with reliability. As the organiser of the British Universities' Championship, I routinely forget to ask people for their date of birth. This means people of the 18-21 generation in particular may get missed out in the statistics... :oops:
Good point Alex. Presumably this would only affect new players - how many are new when you run the Grading ResultFileChecker. Also, of those how many are British?

Neill Cooper
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Neill Cooper » Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:22 pm

Paul Sanders wrote:It would be interesting to see mean ratings per birth year graphed alongside age cohorts...
Indeed.

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Alex Holowczak
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Alex Holowczak » Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:29 pm

Neill Cooper wrote:
Alex Holowczak wrote:There is another problem with reliability. As the organiser of the British Universities' Championship, I routinely forget to ask people for their date of birth. This means people of the 18-21 generation in particular may get missed out in the statistics... :oops:
Good point Alex. Presumably this would only affect new players - how many are new when you run the Grading ResultFileChecker. Also, of those how many are British?
About half our players are English, and half are non-English. (I confess to not checking British!)

The vast majority of players appearing there are players who have played before, albeit some may have played 10 years before (and thus be unknown to the Checker, but known to me when I check the online list). We get very few out-and-out new players.

David Robertson

Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by David Robertson » Sun Oct 23, 2011 11:30 pm

Richard Bates wrote:It depends whether this "popularity" is actually consequence of less interest or a preponderance of other priorities at that age bracket. Post 40 is when i imagine a lot of people would return to the game after long periods of absence
The problem with the 'post-40 returner' hypothesis is the people must once have been 'here' in order to 'return'. The graph as it stands does not allows us to draw that conclusion. We really need 'proportionate retention' time series for given age cohorts. That is, the proportion of 20 year olds retained on the list 10, 20, 30 years later. Either the proportions won't vary much (hence, attrition rate is constant by age cohort); or we'll notice significant booms, busts etc. In any event, we'll know how the baseline at, say, 20 is varying by volume.

As the graph stands at the moment, it resembles a reasonably explicable time-line. One reading might suggest a youthful upsurge followed by rapid decline as exams, career & family formation press upon individuals. Then a return to the game, post-40, followed by a gradual decline into the arms of the Grim Reaper. That reading is, I think, mistaken, not least because it reads the graph back to front (precisely, right to left).

Given this is time series data for the 2011 cohort - not the 2001, 1991 etc cohorts where the graphs would look quite different - the only way to read the data is as historic snapshot. We see to the left both the 'baby boom' cohort (now 60+), followed by the 'Fischer boom' cohort (now 50+). Thereafter we see a substantial falling away. We can confirm this in rudimentary terms whenever we play in a sizeable event. Hence I conclude, in response to Richard's observation, that there are no substantial numbers available for any post-40 return. In due course, the 'teen bulge' that we observe on the 2011 graph will flatten away by 2021, to be replaced by a 'teen bulge' for that later cohort.

What we really need therefore is to compare age profiles for different cohorts. I'd bet, without recourse to any science, that the 'teen bulge' for the 1981 cohort will be several times greater than for 2011. The attrition rate would tell us something too.

Neill Cooper
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Neill Cooper » Mon Oct 24, 2011 8:44 am

Paul Sanders wrote:It would be interesting to see mean ratings per birth year graphed alongside age cohorts...
Here is the data if anyone would like to analyse it.
Note that to preserve anonymity grades have been randomly changed by a point or two.
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Gavin Strachan
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Gavin Strachan » Mon Oct 24, 2011 10:43 am

One issue you could read into the stats is that chess is very successful in recent times in recruiting juniors but once they hit adult they stop playing for one reason or another and that is why you see a fall off. One reason for this maybe because the junior organisations tend to run disparately from the adult clubs and so they are not acting as natural feeders to the regular adult clubs; there obvious exceptions like possibly Richmond CC.

Roger de Coverly
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Roger de Coverly » Mon Oct 24, 2011 12:15 pm

Gavin Strachan wrote:One issue you could read into the stats is that chess is very successful in recent times in recruiting juniors but once they hit adult they stop playing for one reason or another and that is why you see a fall off
From a longer perspective, it's clear that back in the sixties and seventies, there were a lot of players in the age range 14 to 20 and many of them carried on playing as adults. The number of entries in the Times Schools competition and BUCA is evidence of this. For at least twenty years if not longer there's been a lot of activity at Primary School level, little of which has translated into players in the 16-40 age range.

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Gavin Strachan
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Re: Birth year of chess players

Post by Gavin Strachan » Mon Oct 24, 2011 12:33 pm

Those born in the 70's (like me) would have the Kasparov as opposed to Fischer effect. In the 80's there were chess programs on TV but after Short in 90's their is very little chess inspiration which is perhaps why a lot of people of my generation who I used to go to the club with stopped. The peek at the end of the 80's and through the 90's is the current crop of juniors and those at University. I must admit the coaching seems a lot better now than in my day. I used to go down the club and just play, i had to buy books and learn as I went which is why my grade didn't go over 100 until after I was 18.