English Chess Forum

Anyone know the answer?

As at August 2011, there were 11,882 players with published grades.

See http://www.sccu.ndo.co.uk/grad.htm, second item down.

Nick Burrows wrote:Anyone know the answer?

Depending on your definition, the ECF grading site gives this answer
http://www.ecfgrading.org.uk/help/

Rank
The player’s rank (Standard or Rapid), excluding FIDE-registered players with nationality other than English. Players graded 0 are not ranked. The total number of ranked players is currently 9458 (Standard), 4070 (Rapid).

You can get a different answer from downloading the data and counting the number of rows. That comes to 12289 which measures how many have either a current standard or rapidplay grade. There's probably another one or two thousand who have played in the last three years, but haven't played enough to meet the minimum qualification standard.

The ECF has data on line going back eighteen years. By way of estimation, if you take two common surnames, there are 108 active players named Smith and 86 named Jones. If you include inactive players, you get 976 Smith and 703 Jones. This implies a total size of over 100,000 names. Old data, particularly unpublished data isn't very reliable, and there may be numerous duplicates. The database managers would know the exact count, if they wished to divulge it.

Just counting the number of rows in a grading list tells you how many played in England, chess being international there are any number of foreign players plus Scots, Welsh and Irish in the list.

Hi Nick - do you have the answer you were looking for?