I used the USCF membership rating database to compute the rating distribution for “active” players with established (that is, not provisional) ratings. My definition of “active” is at least one USCF tournament result in the last year. The graphs are below.
I’m thinking about writing a script to automatically harvest the data and regenerate these graphs regularly. In my “copious spare time,” of course.
5 Comments
Very interesting! It seems that the US has a lot more players down the lower rated end than the UK. This I guess shows that chess is more popular in the US at the grass roots level.
http://www.bluehorizonweb.com/blog/2008/03/general/ecf-grading-statistical-distribution/
Hi Dave,
Thanks for commenting! I was intrigued to see that someone else had the same urge that I did to look at the rating distribution.
I plan to post some additional comments about the USCF distribution when I get a chance.
I think the high number of low ratings in the USCF distribution is because of the relatively large number of scholastic players.
Quoting Steve: “I think the high number of lower rated [USCF] players is because of the relatively large number of scholastic players.” This is probably correct, though the phrasing is akward…In particular what we are observing with the American distribution is more or less a bi-modal distribution super imposed onto a normal bell curve. The British distrubtion on the other hand, is a classic bell curve. Anyway, interesting graphs! I am glad somebody did this, so that we lazier chess players have a quick reference to see where our ratings put us in the scheme of things. Perhaps there is a way to seperate out the scholastic players? I know the USCF website does not list birthdates (unlike the FIDE website)…so this may be difficult. Anyway thanks again!
-Jordan
Jordan—The USCF ratings database distributed to tournament directors does not have birthdates in it, or even membership classes.