According to both common wisdom and studies, the chess mastery of a player strongly depends on the number of games he has played in his life. Let’s take a look at the list of some of the top chess talents in history – those who became GM before age 15 and proceeded to cross the 2700 mark.

 
A few quick observations:

1)      The numbers can’t be directly compared since players had different initial ratings. For example, Caruana obtained an initial rating of 2032 and crossed the 2700 mark after 837 more games, while Ponomariov started at 2350 and improved to 2700+ in 376 games. Of course, Ruslan must have been playing in strong non-rated tournaments to make it to 2350, but there is no publicly available data on this.

2)      Caruana’s and Carlsen’s initial ratings were close: 2032 and 2064. Carlsen took 200 less games to improve to 2700+ than Caruana: 637 vs 837.

3)      If we calculate the median number of rated games it takes a top chess talent to reach 2700, it will be about 650 (between Carlsen’s 637 and Bacrot’s 684). Therefore, if you are not 2700+ and haven’t played that many games yet, you have an excuse in the form of lack of experience.

4)      Anish Giri seems to have the best ratio of games/result. In just 488 games he went from 2112 to 2701 – quite an impressive achievement. However, what matters is the final result, not the means via which it was achieved. Obviously, the study/play ratio is not the same for the players.

	1. Written by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it on 19:36 11 àâãóñòà 2011 ã.
	I did not know that. I learned something new today.

Write Comment

Name:
E-mail
Homepage
Title:
BBCode:
Comment:
Code:*