Road to FM
"Every chess master was once a beginner" Irving Chernev.
Actually...every chess grandmaster was once a FIDE master...and every chess amateur dreams to become a grandmaster hence, a FIDE master first of all. In this article I will try to scratch the surface of what the data can tell us about the path to be FM.
Let’s start from the beginning: which data ?
All that I will present comes from the data available on http://ratings.fide.com/download.phtml and for this study I decided to download 100 FIDE Elo rating adjournments ranging from April 2014 up to July 2022. The data have been filtered with the following requirements:
• Only players that have become FM not before April 2016 have been selected. This means that for each selected players at least 24 months of data were available.
• Only players that have played at least 1 game in the 24 months time window before becoming FM were selected.
Results
As a chess amateur my first question to the data has been:
How much do I have to play to be a FM?
To answer this question I decided to study how many games have been played by FM in their last 24 months before acquiring the title. The answer is shown in the following plot:
As can be seen the mean value is at 95 and, given the 24 months, this means that they have played around 4 games per month.
Than I moved to the second question:
How old are the ”new FMs” ?
For this answer I represented the age distribution of the selected players in the month in which they’ve become FM. This distribution is shown in the next figure:
Here the age distribution has a mean value around 24 years BUT, it has a loooong tail towards older ages (you are never too old to do achieve great results in chess!) and has a surprising narrow peak at the mode value that is 17 years old.
As a last result I kept what I think is the most interesting question:
Which is the most common path to became a FM?
Of course when you speak about results in chess you are talking about winning games...and you are talking of improving your rating by winning Elo points. So, the question actually is:
Which is the Elo rating path to became a FM?
In the next and last plot you have the answer:
In the figure the blue dots are the average rating values for each of the last 24 months before becoming FIDE Master while the red bars represent the first (25%) and third (75%) quartiles of the distribution.
As you can see, in addition to the data points in the graph, I also inserted a dashed green line that has been obtained by a linear fit of the first 20 months.
This addition is used to highlight the trend of the ”last mile” in the road to the FM title, where the majority of players improves a lot their Elo rating gain per month thanks to the very very close goal.
Hall of F(M)ame
This final chapter is used to presente a very brief summary of the most notable results I found exploring the data in the course of the analysis.
• The youngest FM in my selected data sample: Vaclav Finek that has become FM at only 9 years old in 2019.
• The youngest female FM in my selected data sample: Alice Lee, FM at only 13 years old in 2022.
• The oldest FM in my selected data sample: Salvador Diaz Carias. Actually the FM title has been given to him thanks to his performance in tournaments in the 1960s but this is really remarkable since he got the title when he was 88 in 2021.
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That's it ! I hope you enjoyed this very little jump into chess data.
You are welcome to leave a comment if you liked the content or if you want to report questions, criticisms or doubts you are welcome as well.
