An overview of team matches from 2008 to today
Hello readers!
Today I'll present the result of some data I gathered regarding team matches since they appeared in 2008 until today. I was always wondering about general team matches statistics since the very first match, started on the 12th of October 2008. How many matches per year? Ratio between standard chess and 960? Average team size? How many teams participated in total?
To that end, I compiled the data of 690796 matches, starting with the very first one up to somewhere in April 2024. I'm not going to pretend the data set is exhaustive, but I'm confident the majority of matches are in it, and it should be representative from a statistical point of view.
First things first: here's a breakdown of some match statistics per year:
Match data per year (enlarge)
This table lists the matches that were successfully started (excluding the ones still in registration phase. There's also some blocked or corrupted matches in my data set).
One first interesting thing is the duration is relatively stable, between 3 and 4 months per match. The decrease in 2023 and 2024 is a bias: many matches are still in progress, and are not taken into account for the metric. The longest match lasted more than 10 years! (to be honest: I suspect there was a technical issue here).
The average match size is also rather constant. Same bias in 2024: the smallest matches tend to end faster. The biggest match had 1817 boards, but it was the only one that ever had more than 1000 players. 20 matches had 500 boards or more, 3775 had 100 or more, 16238 had 50 or more.
Chess 960 is under-represented compared to standard chess, never reaching more than 9% of the total of matches on a yearly basis.
Matches started (enlarge)
What about clubs then? In my data set, 26144 have successfully started at least one match, 9 have played 10000 matches or more, 195 have played 1000 or more, 3743 have played 100 or more, 6944 have played 10 or more.
Teams that played 1000 matches or more (enlarge)
In the table above, the most active clubs for each year are colored in red. It draws stories about teams that started, stopped suddenly or continued their activity.
The number of teams involved in team matches have evolved significantly during the pandemic after being relatively stable between 2008 and 2019. After a peak in 2021, there was a small decrease in 2022 and 2023. Note that 2024 is obviously not finished, and gives opportunity for more teams to become active.
Most active clubs, per year (enlarge)
Number of club having started at least one team match, per year (enlarge)
Something interesting here too: teams #1 and #3 of the team matches leaderboard were never in the most active ones. Overall, the 10 most active teams each year are playing between 10% and 20% of the total matches.
That's it for today. Maybe you have some idea of more metrics I could provide? Ask in comment and I'll tell you if I can answer with the data I have.
See you in matches! (at least, I see you in matches)
Chess statistics
