# of rated players worldwide ?

USCF claims a membership of 85,000.  Wikipedia, on the other hand, reports that USCF membership peaked at 85,000 in 2000, and has been steadily declining to about 77,000 in 2012/2013.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chess_Federation

Probably just trying to estimate it.  I'm sure in the end he'd divide by some number he thinks is reasonable.

As for S Polgar, the source would be interesting.

I'd like to know through time, how many people play chess online regularly.

Chess.com, at any hour, has between about 10-15 thousand.  So lets say 12.5k and the average time spent is 2 hours.  Then that's ~150k regulars on chess.com alone, which is more than I would have guessed.

@pt - you're right. I was planning to substract Fide rated players per country from the overall number, assuming all Fide rated players would have a national rating as well. Anyway, will only be a very rough estimate at the end.

I also wonder where the 7.5m comes from... (Russian schoolboys ?)

A better metric is active members.  The USCF has a large number of Life Members who haven't played a rated game in years.

hicetnunc, how many there are in France?

Shak, I'll have to check, but I think around 10000.

And in the USCF there is something like 35000 unrated members...

Hicetnunc, you will have a hard time getting data from India, China and Russia. I remember reading an article in Europe Echecs explaining that even the russian federation don't know the figures for Russia...

According to this site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_chess

There are 84537 Fide rated players now active ones is a completely different question and could not find the answer.

I personally know 2 Fide players that are not active anymore.What is this information for? Just curious.

This represents 0.01154% of the earth population playing chess using 7.324 billion people.