Countries where chess are most popular?

Please read post 40 in this forum, I don't know how to transfer my mentioned post from that other forum to this very forum, but it gives an answer to how many per population, and helps to form an idea about the popularity, albeit discutablel (as always)

We should also divide countries in separate groups, China/India/The States versus Vaticaan/Monaco, Liechtenstein ...

Who can transfer my TWO posts from that other forum to here ?  Thanks !

Hi Romy, I read that thread but I don't think it really helps with the question of where chess is the most popular. It shows which countries produce the most GMs, but like the poster in post 41 explains, it doesn't really show where chess is most popular across the general population.

India, Russia, U.S.A.

...or to be even more specific than saying simply "Russia"... Maybe I should say "any former Soviet state"?

It's a measure of how FANCY the country is. What's the fanciest country?

No, Benedictine, I just dis(as)sociate myself from the number of GM's, as I used the number of members of chess-dot-com and the total population. 

It gives an idea, not more.    

And at Sekenre : the question says "are" popular, so let us forget about the earlier days, although you are quite right ! 

@WeisseSchachlade : how would you measure that ?    I really fancy that new secretary.., you count who else...

I think Austria is prrretty fancy. There's lots of pianos living there rrright?

I agree with what this guy is saying also.  While GM per capita is helpful, I don't believe it's completely reflective of how popular chess is in the general population.

Can the number of chess.com members per capita from each country be used to gauge popularity?  Do we even have those stats?  If you have an account on chess.com, it shows that you care enough about chess to sign up and knows how to play the game.

Though GM per capita is probably not a good measure, chess.com subscription is a particularly poor one as it is hugely correlated to internet equipment. In developped countries, a 1 Mb/s connection is available to most people, whereas it's still a luxury elsewhere.

... and to fluency in English...

Fide registered players according to country:

The above list was compiled using the official players list of Fide, discussed in the thread: FIDE rating distribution.

I used a perl script to extract nationality data from the downloadable XML file of Fide players list.

I tried to compile the three letter country codes into country names. But based on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 official three letter country code standard this can not be done because Fide seems to use non standard codes. For example the official code for Germany is 'DEU' and Fide uses 'GER', the official code for Greece is 'GRC' and Fide uses 'GRE', etc.

If anyone knows how to translate Fide three letter country codes into country names please let me know since it would be interesting to compile a per capita list of registered players in addition to titled players.

In the above table ISO standard country codes are translated.

Great table. So if we were to cross-reference this with population (and account for economic factors) then we get a good idea of where chess is really popular with the general population. So the likes of France and Spain compare very favourably when you consider the population in relation to India for example.

If this post was your idea of proper grammar and punctuation then I, for one, am glad you are not the ambassador. "He who lives in a glass house should not throw stones" comes to mind. Study harder 

It has to be the Vatican City. Chess comes as second nature,  as scheming, plotting, tactics and manoeuvreing is a way of life there.

Technically it's not a country. It's located on the Southern coast of China, and is a part of China.