Here are the top chess countries according to FIDE:
Rank – Country – Avg Rating of top 10 Players – GMs – IMs – Titled Players
1 Russia 2713 158 437 1661
2 Ukraine 2661 57 170 339
3 United States of America 2627 60 102 463
4 Armenia 2627 19 21 58
5 Hungary 2623 37 102 345
6 Israel 2623 33 40 132
7 China 2617 19 12 82
8 France 2615 29 71 254
9 Georgia 2609 22 28 90
10 Poland 2608 24 79 253
11 Netherlands 2606 21 56 220
12 Germany 2601 61 189 988
Source: FIDE
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
US is #3 and we can’t afford to send a women’s team to the women’s world team championship. How sad!
It seems a bit arbitrary to take the ‘average rating of top 10 GM’ in order to make up the ranking. If you take e.g. the total number of grandmasters, the picture
changes dramatically. If you divide by population, once again everything changes.
>>US is #3 and we can’t afford to send a women’s team to the women’s world team championship. How sad!>>
US is #3 in the Men’s category. Or at least the Mixed (Men and Women’s) category, which, for most countries amounts to the same thing.
>>It seems a bit arbitrary to take the ‘average rating of top 10 GM’ in order to make up the ranking.>>
Not entirely. Since the Olympiads are based on the Top players only, this kind of ranking gives you a vague idea how likely each country is to win the next one.
I would like to see other parameters to measure a country’s chess popularirty and strength. However officially highest 10 players rating average is a good strenght indicator because generally they are the one who represents the country in top international rating/masters/championship tournaments.
some countries can attract highly rated foregin GM’s just to boost their ranking and increase the chances of winning medals. for eg..a top GM decided to play under turkey banner few days back…
also US list includes tons of foreign born GM’s
to be honest – the german ranks include a lot of foreign born chess players, too (as the ranks for US, or the Netherlands, Israel or France do, too…) so – the division of total of population, through total number of titled players would yield a better picture of the overall chess strength of a “nation” …
i think Israel would be top, followed by Armenia, Georgia Hungary and the Netherlands.
Russia, US, Germany and France would drop dramatically i suppose – but i did not do the calculation, yet.
Really this rating does not show popularity of chess in the countries,just the force of the possible best teams.
For me the top chess countries are:
1)Israel,because has one master each 46,338 inhabitants.You can say that most of them are ex-soviets,but the force of numbers are with this country.
2)Georgia: one master each 51,971 inhabitants
3)Armenia,one master each 57,352 inhabitants
Russia,the powerful Russia, has just a master each 87,580 inhabitants and is not in the top 3, and USA just a master each 647,949 inhabitants.
Then american friends,stop thinking that you live in a country that love chess…the glory are for three tiny countries.
Well,this is only that my cold statistics of engineer told.
As always…think about that.
Sorry,but HUNGARY has a master each 29,223 people and is the best chess country in the world.I did not calculated before because i thought that Hungary had more population
Ungh – no India. Some might say that could be the reason for chosing such a ranking system.
Only calculating population vs number of good players ratio is not good enough. There are other parameters to consider…
I’m not advocating that one should take the number of titled players divided by population, or anything. All I’m saying is that depending on the criteria used, you can produce more or less any desired result for your ranking.
Why take the top 10 GM, rather than top 5, or top 20? Should one divide by population, or by the number of active chess players in that country? (Population would be unfair to China or India, where many people have other priorities than chess.)
I find the numbers interesting, but the ranking pretty meaningless.