Talk:List of chess grandmasters

GM birth months

A short example to show how the GMs table can be utilized, and also showing something interesting about GM birth months. Fernand Gobet wrote in his book The Psychology of Chess (2019) that the births of strong chess players are more concentrated in the the first half of the year (January to June) than the second half. This is unexplained and surprising since overall more births occur in the last half of the year. (I think October might have the most births.) This claim is about strong chess players and not just GMs, but since we have a list of GMs available it's interesting to look at it.

Reading the GMs table in Python requires only two lines of code:

import pandas as pd
gms = pd.read_html('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_grandmasters', attrs={'id': 'grandmasters'})[0]

Checking the births per month

gms.Born.str.split('-').str[1].value_counts()

shows the most common birth month is January followed by April, May and February. In fact four of the top five birth months are in the first quarter of the year.

01    195
04    182
05    182
02    171
03    166
06    155
07    149
08    145
11    144
10    138
09    137
12    120

If you're familiar with Pandas and matplotlib it only takes a modest amount of effort to produce a publication quality graph which clearly shows the preponderance of births in the first half of the year:

%matplotlib inline
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.ticker as ticker

with plt.style.context('fivethirtyeight'):
    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6,4))
    gms.Born.str.split('-').str[1].value_counts().sort_index().plot(kind='bar', title='Number of GMs by Birth Month', ax=ax)
    ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(ticker.IndexFormatter('Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec'.split()))
    plt.xticks(rotation=45)
    plt.show()

Number of chess grandmasters by birth month as of November 2019

Arabic world

The word chess comes from the arabic language; as such I find it extremely surprising that there are only a handfull GM's from (even quite big) countries as Algeria (2), Egypt (6), Libya (0), Morocco (1), Syria (0), Tunesia (0), United Arab Emirates (2)... — MFH:Talk 01:06, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Prraneeth Vuppala

already has an article (Prraneeth Vuppala), theres news about him becoming a GM, but FIDE hasnt updated their lists yet. Add now or wait?

--jonas (talk) 15:15, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

Normally we update the lists each month after the monthly FIDE rating list is released. (FIDE often silently updates these lists several times during the month and even some months later.) We don't necessarily have to wait for the next month's rating list, but I would wait until Prraneeth Vuppala rating card at FIDE indicates the GM title. At the moment I'm writing this the FIDE website indicates Prraneeth Vuppula is an IM, so I don't think he's a GM yet. That could change soon. Quale (talk) 21:44, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

khotenashvili

I don't necessarily disagree with the decision to use "Bella" instead of "Bela". But "Bela" is not a typo. chess.com, chessbase, and uschesschamps.com are using "Bela", and Google Translate applied to her Georgian-alphabet name gives "Bela". Bruce leverett (talk) 04:40, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

My comment that it was a typo was intended to indicate it was a typo in this context, not that it was a horribly inexcusable blunder if it was used anywhere at any time. The displayed name in the list was "Bella" but the link was different. Sometimes that's intentional, but here it seemed inadvertent since the bio page is Bella Khotenashvili. FIDE records used "Bela" before March 2023 so the change to "Bella" was recent. Looking at it more closely now I see the bio page was moved on April 30, so my characterization of the change as a typo correction was probably not correct since the link was previously at Bela. Quale (talk) 04:59, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Strictly speaking "Bela" is the correct transliteration, there is only one "l" in the Georgian version. However this could cause confusion as while "Bella" is universally a women's name, "Bela" is more commonly a Hungarian men's name, as in Bela Lugosi and Bela Bartok. This is probably why "Bella" is preferred. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 04:48, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Title years on the FIDE website

FIDE's data quality is not very good and ratings.fide.com has had many mistakes. For a while when Anand was world champion the website had his GM title year wrong. They only corrected it after I emailed them about the error. I will probably email FIDE about these mistakes as well. Normally I would try to add a footnote explaining the FIDE data that does not agree with any other sources, but I'm unsure here since FIDE might correct their errors at any time which could also be confusing to anyone who was checking as the discrepancy would be gone.

Grandmaster	ratings.fide.com title year	Correct title year
Giorgadze, Tamaz	1978	1977
Kochyev, Alexander	1979	1977
Rodríguez Céspedes, Amador	1978	1977
Spassov, Liuben	1977	1976

The correct title years are confirmed by the following sources, all agreeing and all generally more reliable than ratings.fide.com:

• Elo, Arpad (1978), The Rating of Chessplayers Past & Present, Arco Publishing, pp. 175–190, ISBN 0-668-04721-6
• Gaige, Jeremy (1987), Chess Personalia, A Biobibliography, McFarland, ISBN 0-7864-2353-6
• Iclicki, Willy (2016), FIDE Golden Book 1924–2016, pp. 115–145

Quale (talk) 07:00, 3 July 2024 (UTC)