An unexamined life is not worth living.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Visualizing Chess - What Chess Openings Score Best for White and Black?

Inspired by recent articles on data mining of chess information, I pulled out my query on a chess SQL database that I ran on 1.5 million games, and with the help of Tableau Public – generated this infographic on 500 ECO codes. Here are the results:

  • Black does best with the ECO codes in bottom right corner
  • White scores best in the top left corner
  • For example A94 (Dutch Stonewall with Ba3) is the best scoring code for White
  • B59 (Sicilian, Boleslavsky variation) – apparently scores really well for Black.

If you are not too familiar with what opening moves each code corresponds to – this Wikipedia page will be helpful - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings.

Image

Does anything on this chart look surprising? Is your favourite opening in the expected part of the diagram?

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