I wanted to do a quick recap of the 2022 Chess Candidates Tournament that saw Ian Nepomniachtchi emerge as the challenger for the second time. There were some good findings in there! Click on the graphic to see it in full size. .viz { margin: 1rem auto; display: block; } img { width: 100%; }

We’re looking deeper into the amazing MillionBase database with over two million chess games to see what else we can learn about the data specifically, and possibly about chess in general. I have analyzed some of this data in Part 1. If you haven’t seen that, feel free to give it a read. This post will focus on other aspects of the data, and I have drawn from some reader suggestions from the previous post.

I wanted to do something like this for a long time, and finally I think it’s at a point where I can release this into the wild. We’ll take a look at more than 2 million games, taken from the MillionBase PGN database. I ignored any Chess960 games contained, but in total there are 2,197,113 games. I was interested to see what kind of visualizations I can do, and what patterns would be revealed by considering so many games.