Have you ever wondered which countries produced more chess grandmasters? Or in which countries are women more interested in chess? Is there a correlation between the population of the country and the number of grandmasters it produced?
The infographic below will answer all these questions:
As you can see, it shows the number of men and women grandmasters for top four countries with the flag dimensions relative to each country’s population size. The data is for valid for December 2018.
As a note, FIDE has two grandmaster titles: “Grandmaster” (GM) and “Women Grandmaster” (WGM). While most women in this chart hold the WGM title, some hold the GM one and some both! They are still counted once though.
This infographic is released under a Creative Commons License / BY-ND, which means please feel free to redistribute it as long as you link back to sparkchess.com and you don’t alter it. You can download high-quality print-quality PDF:
In case you’re curious, here’s the full top 10:
| Country | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|
| Russia | 223 | 70 |
| Germany | 94 | 21 |
| Ukraine | 83 | 30 |
| United States | 89 | 19 |
| India | 53 | 16 |
| Serbia | 51 | 18 |
| China | 39 | 27 |
| Hungary | 48 | 16 |
| France | 49 | 9 |
| Spain | 52 | 6 |
The picture is wrong.
Women are added to men except for Ukraine.
Ukraine : 113 + 30 = 143
Germany : 94 + 21 = 115
But at the gaphic, Germany counts 115 GM and Ukraine 113 in spite of 143
I’m sorry – the chart is correct, the table was wrong. I initially had the total number of GMs in the first column and women in the second, which was confusing, so I placed men in the first, but I forgot to subtract correctly for Ukraine. Thanks for pointing it out.