
Chess Opening Moves
Analysed the data of around 200,000 online chess games hosted on the lichess.org platform. The game data has been extracted from the official database of the Lichess website.
This project aims at analysing the data of online chess games hosted on the lichess.org platform. The game data has been extracted from the official database of the website. To be specific, the following points of interest have been considered and analysed for insights:
I. Most famous or widely used opening moves / tactics that are successful and least used Tactics that have high probability of winning.
II. The opening moves that have high probability of failure
III. Analysis of opening moves based on player levels
The aforementioned exploratory analysis has been performed using Python implemented using Jupyter Notebooks in Google Colaboratory environment, which is a cloud environment for programming and sharing files.
Upon analysis, it was noticed that modern defense was the most widely used opening move and its white win percentage was 50 % , whereas the next most widely used move was Scandinavian Defense with win rate of white for 57%. The move with the least success among widely used opening moves was found to be Vant Kruij’s opening with win percentage of 43% . The opening moves of players as they progressed through different expertise levels has also been analysed. Other similar analysis have been detailed in the report. As a further step, these moves can be used to train a chess engine using Artificial Intelligence with additional bias for better results.
Highlights
200,000
Games considered for analysis
130000
Games obtained after cleaning and filtering
56.98 %
Win rate of Scandinavian Defense: Mieses-Kotroc Variation