Chess_3280_FinalProject

Magnus Carlsen is the Greatest Chess Player of All Time

Chess is an international sport played by hundred’s of millions of people around the world. While there is such a magnitude of players, only a select percentage of them are known as masters, which has its own rankings as well. Chess has an ELO system to rank its players, and to reach the lowest overall master title, the Candidate Master (CM), one must achieve an ELO FIDE ranking of 2200 (FIDE is the World Chess Federation). Moving up, there exists the FIDE Master (FM) at 2300, International Master (IM) at ~2400, and finally the highest ranking of them all, the Grandmaster (GM) at ~2600. To put these ELO rankings into context, of all of the FIDE registered players, only 0.85% are Grandmasters. In terms of the chess-playing populaton, this is effectively close to 0%.

This is where Magnus Carlsen comes in. Magnus Carlsen, a Norwegian Chess player, is currently ranked as the top FIDE rated chess player at an ELO of 2830, with his peak at 2882. He’s been the World Champion 5 times, the Chess World Cup Champion, and has also been the world champion of time-control specific modes for many years as well. With this project, I aim to prove the statement that Magnus Carlsen is the Greatest Chess Player of All Time.

Plot 1 : Tableau Plot 2

Tableau Plot

As shown above, we’re starting with a Chlorpleth map describing the international impact that Chess has. Shown above is the distribution of FIDE registered players around the World as of January 2024. As we can see, the gradient legend shows that countries range from a mere 1 person that is FIDE registered to over 100,000 individuals registered. The top countries we see with the most players registered are Russia, India, and the United States. As you can see, chess has an insane breadth around the world, with even more players that may not be registered with FIDE.

Plot 2 : Tableau Plot 2

Moving forward, I show another distribution of currently living grandmasters around the world. From first glance at the legend, we see that the range of numbers has SIGNIFICANTLY dropped, from hundreds of thousands to just below 200. However, the same distribution applies from the previous plot, where we find that Russia, the United States, and India, have the greatest number of FIDE Grandmasters (GMs).

Plot 3 : Comparison of Championship Wins By Top World Champions

Now that we know the global perspective of the ratio of Grandmasters to general players, let’s dive deeper into metrics regarding the world. I’ll start off with the Chess World Championships. Shown above are the World Champions from 1886 to 2023. While there have been World Chess Champions prior to 1886, the format of the championship was different and so I have chosen not to include them in order to provide the best comparison. As we see here, we find that the players who have the most championships (>= 5) are Emanuel Lasker, Mikhail Botvinnik, Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen. As we see , Carlsen already ranks close to the top in terms of World Champions. For further context, Carlsen has publicly stated that since he was the reigning champion for 5-years straight, he wanted to relinquish the title such that he will “actually have a challenge” in the upcoming years rather than having the stress of defending the title. As such, the 2023 World Champion was Ding Liren. Perhaps if he chose to defend his title, he may have been the 2023 World Champion!

Plot 4 : A View Into Carlsen’s Championships

Diving even deeper into Carlsen’s Championship history, we look beyond just the World Chess Championships and also include the World Rapid and World Blitz Championships. As we can see, Carlsen has held some form of a champion title since as early as 2013 until 2022 (2020 was skipped as the World Championships were not held due to COVID-19). Given this timeline of his achievement’s, we see his dominance in the tournament space has existed for more than a decade now. Are you not convinced that he’s the best player yet!?

Plot 5 : Animated Plot of Carlsen’s ELO Over Time

If you’re not convinced, let’s take a look at his ELO progression over the years. The above visualization starts from Jan 2004 and ends Mar 2024. As we can see, his progression is nearly alike a logarithimic scale, where he has only recently plateaued in the mid 2800’s. While it can be argued, “Why has he plateaued and not continued his growth?”, this can be explained by the fact that he is currently the highest rated player in the world. As such, whenever he wins against lower-rated players, he only achieves a point gain of ~5 ELO points. If he draws against slightly lower-rated players, he does not gain any points and sometimes even loses rating points. As such, the difficulty of gaining ELO points at his level is extraordinarily difficult, he is quite literally suffering from his success.

Plot 6 : Comparing Carlsen’s ELO to Top Players

Adding onto that argument, here is a modern plot showing his dominance by ELO in comparison to the currently top rated players as of April 2024. He is nearly 20 ELO points greater than Fabiano Caruana! While 20 ELO points may not seem like a lot, it is a significant difference, considering how high all of their ELOs are. Furthermore, if you look at the Top 4-10 players, all of their ratings differ by at most 4 rating points. This further emphasizes how difficult gaining rating points are at that level, and how amazing Carlsen’s ELO is.

Plot 7 : Shiny -

https://jhf9vk.shinyapps.io/ChessVis1/

Going onto a different perspective, if we compare Carlsen to other players that many deem as the ’Greatest of All Time”, we find that Carlsen dominates in nearly every manner! When comparing Carlsen to the other highly regarded players in history, we see that his ELO across all time-controls (Classical, Rapid, Blitz) surpasses every individual. Furthermore, when we compare his Win/Draw/Loss proportions to these other players, we see that his Win proportion is higher than all of the listed players, his Loss proportion is lower than all of the players, and his Draw proportion is typically similar to all of the other players. Carlsen’s reign over the Chess world once again proves to be significantly greater than other individuals incorrectly named as the “Greatest of All Time”.

Plot 8 : Shiny -

https://jhf9vk.shinyapps.io/ChessVis2/

Finally, an argument can be said that some of the players in the previous plot are not of the same era, and as such, is an invalid claim. To disprove this argument, I have provided an interactive heatmap in this ShinyApp that shows the proportion of games where he has won against the other player. This proportion is determined by the ratio of points he has earned, relative to the number of games he has played against the respective opponent (A win is counted as 1 point, a draw is counted as 0.5 points, and a loss is considered 0 points). Regardless of the players we chose, we find that the win percentage never drops below 0.5. Using the previous ShinyApp and this ShinyApp, as well as the arguments made in the above plots, I can confidently state that Carlsen is the Greatest Player of All Time.