Data Analytics + Chess = Cool insights

A peice of code in the hands of a coder is like a weapon. He would execute it, modify it and ultimately try to apply it in every possible scenario.

Similar was the case when I was introduced to Gephi and data analytics a week ago.

I read a lot about big data on the internet, saw videos on youtube about it and started exploring more about its applications. I came across a lot of information and some of them include:

- Structured data accounts to only 10% of worlds total data. Business decisions are made based on this. Rest 90% is unstructured data.
- Retailers are using bigdata analytics to understand their customers, predict their preferences and promote offerings accordingly. etc.

This created a lot of interest in me to explore more about Gephi...

I started playing chess couple of years back. I fell in love with the game and came to know that we could play online with quality players on chess.com. With this interest in me, I now play almost 4 to 5 games everyday. I usually win most of the matchesand i observed that I had improved a lot in the last few months.

Now, can i somehow try to apply what all i have learned in my class and understand if i could see a pattern of my moves or could i predict what my opening moves? I didnt wait  a second. I quickly went to the game archive on chess.com and extracted all the data onto my machine. It downloaded as .pgn file which had details like a) Match results b) my scores before and after the match c) log containing all the moves(step by step). d) total moves etc.

I then formatted the data using an excel and feeded it to gephi.

Here are some of the results and observations:

- The total number of games (Live Chess - Blitz) i have played so far = 1326
- My average rating is 1324
- My highest rating was 1593
- Among all the matches i won, the average number of steps i played was equal to35
- The match in which i played the least number of steps to win was 10 and the match in which i played the maximum number of  steps to win against an opponent was 69
- In the last 92 matches i won 79.
- 80% of my matches were against players from US ( this might be because i usually play in the night and it is morning in US, so there are more players online from US).
- I play an average of 36 matches per month. and I play 8-10 days in a month. i.e. I play minimum 4 matches on the day i login to chess.com
This inturn means, i spend atleast 90minutes of my time on chess.
- In 65% of my matches, I move the king's pawn as my first move. and of these 92% of the times i won.

There were lot of other observations i made and all i can say is that i'm just amazed by the applications of data analytics and the free tools like Gephi. They really are of great help.

Next time someone plays chess with me, i would surely change my first move :)