Angus French wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2018 11:30 am
Some stats from the January 2018 master list:
I'll look at the 3rd and 5th columns of your first table and compare them with FIDE stats both for ENG and across federations.
Column 3 is the counts for players of different ages having played at least one standard or rapid game and column 5 is the same for female players.
Rather than break down by decade I'm going to combine them and look at U20, 20 to 49 and 50+ because the data suggests that players are very enthusiastic up to 20. Then most of them give. Slowly the men come back but never to junior levels. Women just gradually lose interest.
So, the ECF data looks like this -
All Players
U20 - 7498 / 18808 = 39.9%
20 - 49 - 3104 / 18808 = 16.5%
S50 - 4289 / 18808 = 22.8%
No DoB - 3917 / 18808 = 20.8%
Females
U20 - 1231 / 1544 = 79.7%
20 - 49 - 131 / 1544 = 8.5%
S50 - 73 / 1544 = 4.7%
No DoB - 109 / 1544 = 7%
The FIDE data, using counts for active players, looks like this -
All players
U20 - 1591 / 5491 = 29%
20 - 49 - 1768 / 5491 = 32.2%
S50 - 1952 / 5491 = 35.5%
No DoB - 180 / 5491 = 3.3%
Females
U20 - 248 / 415 = 59.8%
20 - 49 - 96 / 415 = 23.1%
S50 - 60 / 415 = 14.4%
No DoB - 11 / 415 = 2.7%
The differences aren't that surprising. The ECF grades lots of junior competitions for weak players who are likely to make lots of illegal moves. The FIDE rules aren't really appropriate for that level of player and they don't play FIDE chess until they get much stronger. Result: the FIDE U20 percentages are much lower than the ECF ones and the older categories are correspondingly higher.
The question is, how do other federations compare?