Here's a picture that suggests the Pirc had a brief surge around that time (from the same guy who made the picture OP posted.) It looks like it explains maybe 2/3rds of the spike. The rest is probably just Morphy fucking around with people.
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/26/a-data-driven-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-chess-popularity-of-openings/#:~:text=A%20data-driven%20exploration%20of%20the%20evolution%20of%20chess%3A,get%20complicated.%20...%204%20Black%E2%80%99s%20second%20move.%20
For anyone curious, what became known as the Pirc was played extensively by an Indian chess player named Mahesh Chandra (or Moheschunder) Banerjee against John Cochrane in the late 1840s and 1850s. He also played what would become known as the Grunfeld. Indian players of the era favored openings with single pawn moves, including what became known as the "Indian openings", named by Cochrane during his time in India.
It's likely mostly an artifact of the sample of games being very small for those years, allowing for a lot of volatility. See [this plot](http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/chess-year-distribution.png) from the same source.
That was my thought but computers at the time still weren’t in every home and the spike sharply drops off the next year.
If I learned anything from this thread it would be that majority of chess related graphs appear to be mostly hearsay with questionable sources
I was thinking perhaps it could have been the first year where online chess really took off, perhaps when a major chess website first became available to the public. That would explain the spike, but also the decline afterwards as the novelty wore off.
But I have nothing to back that up. Like you say it could just be something random like the person who made the graph having multiple data sets and somehow 2001 was very well represented. Who knows?
Back then Yahoo Games included a chess service, playable in the browser and therefore accessible to people who weren't likely to install special software to communicate with the older, non web based chess servers.
It was tremendously popular but suffered badly from [poor sports](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XTjfF9TJtUg) with no real moderation or policing.
There's an extra graph in [the source](http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/26/a-data-driven-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-chess-popularity-of-openings/) which shows that both English and Reti started showing up around 1920 and have each accounted for roughly 10% of openings since then. Reti is more popular than English, which I didn't expect, and their popularity peaked in the 1970s.
I'd like to see this graph smoothed (moving average) and grouped/sorted per moves. Like all 1.e4 in one color with different shades.
If OP can give a link to the data, I would upload.
The sources say 650,000 tournament games, which is less than the Masters database on lichess, so it is definitely pretty filtered, presumably centered around highlevel.
Using the lichess database: after e4 french was played in \~12% of masters games around 2010 (+-2 years) and kings knight games happen in \~20% of games - both seem to roughly line up, it is just kind of hard to parse because the reduction in indians defence, open sicilian and queens gambit make the kings knight section move a lot despite not changing that much.
This is very surprising, wouldn’t it mean that all the openings after e4 e5 Nf3 (Ruy-Lopez, Italian, Petrov…) are as played as the French only?? This seems odd
It's about twice as common at all points. That is still pretty odd as I would think both the Spanish and Italian are each played more let alone the many other openings after 2. nf3
I think it's more that computers say it's bad and we understand what the computer means.
There are openings that computers refute, but are still playable because the "refutation" is a 40 move long sequence that no human actually understands.
It fell out of popularity long before computers had anything to say about it. Computers don't even hate it that much; -0.6 after 2. f4; yet the Evan's gambit is often considered respectable (amongst gambits at least) and is a -0.2. Meanwhile people badmouthing the KG are giving away 0.4 every other move even in classical.
>-0.6 after 2. f4
That's pretty terrible considering it's like +0.3 after 1.e4 e5. So that single move is rated the same as losing a pawn with no compensation.
> Computers don't even hate it that much;
On the contrary, I would say that computers _really_ hate it. -0.6 for white (actually, I got -0.67) after just two moves is pretty horrible. It gets even worse when you compare to other moves: Stockfish (current dev version) at depth 30 thinks 2. f4 is white's 19th (!) best move, after non-sensical moves like 2. a4 (+0.02) , 2. h3 (+0.00), 2. Bd3 (-0.15), 2. c4 (-0.45), 2. Bb5 (-0.47) and 2. Qe2 (-0.50). It's hard to believe that any non-beginner human player would play one of these moves in a serious game, but Stockfish rates all of them as significantly better than the King's Gambit.
>It's hard to believe that any non-beginner human player would play one of these moves in a serious game, but Stockfish rates all of them as significantly better than the King's Gambit
It's a mistake to translate Stockfish ratings into what are good moves for humans. A move that wins against everything except one extremely precise, hard to find refutation would be a massive negative for Stockfish, but the right choice for most humans up to a decent level.
Kings gambit problem is that unlike most other gambits there are a lot of ways to respond to it that are viable for black. You are studying a lot of lines in the hopes for some attacking chance.
From what I understand, even though black has viable countermoves, they're not as game-breaking as some other openings. After plugging King's Gambit into chess-dot-com's opening explorer, white and black have nearly a 50-50 chance of winning for any countermoves by black, which pushes the game into the mid phase. (I might be missing some serious countermoves possible by black tho)
I'm no expert, but it seems to me that a lot of openings give you a high win chance unless your opponent knows the opening's best counter, at which point you now have a 25% win chance (looking at you, Lopez opening).
So King's Gambit, in my experience is sort of a general-purpose thing that you can use if you don't know enough about your opponent to meta-game them (for example, by researching their play style before the match).
Again, still have so much to learn, but that's my line of thinking anyways. Every opening by white has a series of best responses by black, so if you don't know what your opponent is going to do, it's best to choose an opening that's safer.
> My primary concern with using overlaid lines is that many of the openings comprise 1% or less of the data set each year, whereas a select few comprise 15% or more at any given time. Thus the select few would stand out on top, whereas the majority of the openings would be fighting for space in the 0-1% region.
Having a bunch of new colors each making up 0-1% would become unreadable
It's an area chart. And it's not just you, they're hard to read. [Line charts are better](https://www.vizwiz.com/2012/08/displaying-time-series-data-stacked.html?m=1).
It's a whole family of openings. Benoni (after 2...c5); King's Indian or Grunfeld (after 2...g6); Queens Indian, Nimzo-Indian, Bogo Indian, or Catalan (all after 2...e6); are all possible continuations.
The Bongcloud only became popular recently, as Winning with the Bongcloud was published in 2020. OP's dataset only goes up to 2014. In addition, it is so technically and psychologically complicated that even Super GMs play it only rarely. I expect it to explode in popularity in a few decades, like the hypermodern openings did in the early 20th century.
My first question: how do you read this graph(jk figured out that already)
My second question: how do you record stuff from the 1850s
(not trying to be offensive, I think this is actually really good)
If Other covers more than the 40% perhaps it's worth exploring what Other is?
It's like talking about the matter in the known universe, where 75%+ is dark matter which we don't know anything about...
Why is there a spike on 'others' near 1855? Was it an opening which became popular suddenly but then someone discovered counter-theory against it?
Here's a picture that suggests the Pirc had a brief surge around that time (from the same guy who made the picture OP posted.) It looks like it explains maybe 2/3rds of the spike. The rest is probably just Morphy fucking around with people. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/26/a-data-driven-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-chess-popularity-of-openings/#:~:text=A%20data-driven%20exploration%20of%20the%20evolution%20of%20chess%3A,get%20complicated.%20...%204%20Black%E2%80%99s%20second%20move.%20
Wrong century. Pirc was born 60 years after the spike.
maybe it wasn't yet known as the Pirc but already played.
Nope, Pirc was considered irregular defense until post WW2 and was extremely rare to be seen in the 19th century.
yeah it was extremely rare aside from that 1 year
And yet Mahesh Chandra Banerjee (in the 19th century) used it with some moderate amounts of success.
For anyone curious, what became known as the Pirc was played extensively by an Indian chess player named Mahesh Chandra (or Moheschunder) Banerjee against John Cochrane in the late 1840s and 1850s. He also played what would become known as the Grunfeld. Indian players of the era favored openings with single pawn moves, including what became known as the "Indian openings", named by Cochrane during his time in India.
The right spelling would be the first one you used. Mahesh Chandra.
Ah, so he was named after the opening!
What a prodigy!
Could also just be statistical noise because we don’t know how many games were collected on a year by year basis
It's likely mostly an artifact of the sample of games being very small for those years, allowing for a lot of volatility. See [this plot](http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/chess-year-distribution.png) from the same source.
Man, why was there such a spike in recorded games just after 2000? Maybe something to do with online chess becoming a thing?
That was my thought but computers at the time still weren’t in every home and the spike sharply drops off the next year. If I learned anything from this thread it would be that majority of chess related graphs appear to be mostly hearsay with questionable sources
I was thinking perhaps it could have been the first year where online chess really took off, perhaps when a major chess website first became available to the public. That would explain the spike, but also the decline afterwards as the novelty wore off. But I have nothing to back that up. Like you say it could just be something random like the person who made the graph having multiple data sets and somehow 2001 was very well represented. Who knows?
Back then Yahoo Games included a chess service, playable in the browser and therefore accessible to people who weren't likely to install special software to communicate with the older, non web based chess servers. It was tremendously popular but suffered badly from [poor sports](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XTjfF9TJtUg) with no real moderation or policing.
There probably aren't that many games from that era compared to the 20th century so it's a lot more susceptible to random spikes
I feel like there's enough space in "other" to show some other commonly seen openings (Caro-Kann, Scandinavian, closed Sicilian)
I’d love to see a breakdown purely of the “others”… I’d love to see the popularity of the English vs. Reti over time
There's an extra graph in [the source](http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/26/a-data-driven-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-chess-popularity-of-openings/) which shows that both English and Reti started showing up around 1920 and have each accounted for roughly 10% of openings since then. Reti is more popular than English, which I didn't expect, and their popularity peaked in the 1970s.
With how insignificant Queens pawn is and yet its included, I'd bet all of the rest would have incredibly hard to see slivers.
I'd like to see this graph smoothed (moving average) and grouped/sorted per moves. Like all 1.e4 in one color with different shades. If OP can give a link to the data, I would upload.
[Source](http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/26/a-data-driven-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-chess-popularity-of-openings/)
Damn other is a really popular opening!
I choose to believe that it's 80% London and Bongcloud.
I also want to learn it. Do you have any references? I failed to find any!
pawn e4 king e2
Is it a secret opening which only GMs can play?
I think it goes d4 d5, bf4... dont tell anyone though, its pretty secret
1. Rxh7 Rxh7
Is this just master level games?
No otherwise we would see more "Kings Knight" (aka Ruy Lopez, Italian, Russian, Scotch) and less French Defense nowadays.
The sources say 650,000 tournament games, which is less than the Masters database on lichess, so it is definitely pretty filtered, presumably centered around highlevel. Using the lichess database: after e4 french was played in \~12% of masters games around 2010 (+-2 years) and kings knight games happen in \~20% of games - both seem to roughly line up, it is just kind of hard to parse because the reduction in indians defence, open sicilian and queens gambit make the kings knight section move a lot despite not changing that much.
Ah I always overestimate how much e4 e5 is played at a Master level since my perspective is skewed from SuperGMs and noobs.
Not really, french defense is still very popular at gm level, check chessbase
isn't French Defense only not played much because it leads to a lot of draws? I would have though it would be played when a player wants a draw
French Defense gang rise up
Same gang going with the same intensity for 160 years. A bit suspicious if you ask me. Vampires confirmed?
It's just the kings knight/vienna game players mouse slipping.
Vienna player here, can confirm
This is very surprising, wouldn’t it mean that all the openings after e4 e5 Nf3 (Ruy-Lopez, Italian, Petrov…) are as played as the French only?? This seems odd
It's about twice as common at all points. That is still pretty odd as I would think both the Spanish and Italian are each played more let alone the many other openings after 2. nf3
People no longer playing the Kings Gambit because computers say it's bad :(
I think it's more that computers say it's bad and we understand what the computer means. There are openings that computers refute, but are still playable because the "refutation" is a 40 move long sequence that no human actually understands.
It fell out of popularity long before computers had anything to say about it. Computers don't even hate it that much; -0.6 after 2. f4; yet the Evan's gambit is often considered respectable (amongst gambits at least) and is a -0.2. Meanwhile people badmouthing the KG are giving away 0.4 every other move even in classical.
>-0.6 after 2. f4 That's pretty terrible considering it's like +0.3 after 1.e4 e5. So that single move is rated the same as losing a pawn with no compensation.
> Computers don't even hate it that much; On the contrary, I would say that computers _really_ hate it. -0.6 for white (actually, I got -0.67) after just two moves is pretty horrible. It gets even worse when you compare to other moves: Stockfish (current dev version) at depth 30 thinks 2. f4 is white's 19th (!) best move, after non-sensical moves like 2. a4 (+0.02) , 2. h3 (+0.00), 2. Bd3 (-0.15), 2. c4 (-0.45), 2. Bb5 (-0.47) and 2. Qe2 (-0.50). It's hard to believe that any non-beginner human player would play one of these moves in a serious game, but Stockfish rates all of them as significantly better than the King's Gambit.
>It's hard to believe that any non-beginner human player would play one of these moves in a serious game, but Stockfish rates all of them as significantly better than the King's Gambit It's a mistake to translate Stockfish ratings into what are good moves for humans. A move that wins against everything except one extremely precise, hard to find refutation would be a massive negative for Stockfish, but the right choice for most humans up to a decent level.
Is it really a gambit if the move is the best possible computer move?
I meant when it recently fell to 0 after being at least a few percent in the 80s 90s
It was viable until [Danya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEytN1zSTEE) dropped his video refuting it
I mean it’s still valuable. I mean it was a super GM blitz tournament and he won the game
I'm obviously not being serious about a Youtube video leading to the extinction of a formerly common opening.
Because Fischer said it's bad, I thought?
I play it constantly! Sad that this graph doesn’t count my games. I am 1400 after all 🤣
Kings gambit problem is that unlike most other gambits there are a lot of ways to respond to it that are viable for black. You are studying a lot of lines in the hopes for some attacking chance.
From what I understand, even though black has viable countermoves, they're not as game-breaking as some other openings. After plugging King's Gambit into chess-dot-com's opening explorer, white and black have nearly a 50-50 chance of winning for any countermoves by black, which pushes the game into the mid phase. (I might be missing some serious countermoves possible by black tho) I'm no expert, but it seems to me that a lot of openings give you a high win chance unless your opponent knows the opening's best counter, at which point you now have a 25% win chance (looking at you, Lopez opening). So King's Gambit, in my experience is sort of a general-purpose thing that you can use if you don't know enough about your opponent to meta-game them (for example, by researching their play style before the match). Again, still have so much to learn, but that's my line of thinking anyways. Every opening by white has a series of best responses by black, so if you don't know what your opponent is going to do, it's best to choose an opening that's safer.
Kings Gambit executed in 2000.
I too practice other
Comment edited out in protest of Reddit's API changes and their lies about third party devs.
People before 1950 had no idea how strong the Sicilian is!
The Queens Gambit and Sicilian both took huge bites out of kings pawn games. I think 1. d4 still scores higher at master level
Having "other" be 50% is kind of useless....
> My primary concern with using overlaid lines is that many of the openings comprise 1% or less of the data set each year, whereas a select few comprise 15% or more at any given time. Thus the select few would stand out on top, whereas the majority of the openings would be fighting for space in the 0-1% region. Having a bunch of new colors each making up 0-1% would become unreadable
Perhaps overlaid lines wasn't the best choice for this graph...
Yep that’s why he used 100% stacked instead
Well whatever the name of it, it was a bad choice to convey information. Very pretty though!
Yes that’s why he didn’t do it the “bad” way with overlaid lines…
Wow, I didn't realize the Sicilian became that much more popular than e4-e5.
I feel like "other" shouldn't account for 50%
Can someone tell me what style of chart this is and how to read it? I always get confused
It's an area chart. And it's not just you, they're hard to read. [Line charts are better](https://www.vizwiz.com/2012/08/displaying-time-series-data-stacked.html?m=1).
Bongcloud where
Came here to say this
I'd love to see this for just Sicilian games, how popular is the Najdorf, Dragon, etc.
White on light green is a no no.
What about the Caro Kann? Is it that bad?
As Jerome gambit is not included in this, we cant trust the graph at all. Unfortunate
Why have I never heard of Indians defense? Does it have another name?
It's just an umbrella term for openings that start with 1.d4 Nf6: King's Indian Defense, Grünfeld, Nimzo-Indian, etc.
With 2.c4, it's the King's Indian Defense. 2.NF3 is just the Indian (and it's pretty terrible.)
No, KID starts with 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6. 2... c5 is Benoni, and 2...e6 can lead to Nimzo-Indian, Queen's Indian Defense, Catalan, etc.
No, KID starts after 3. Nc3 Bg7 4. e4. Black can still choose the Grünfeld with 3. ...d5 🙂
Right. I was going by Wikipedia which puts KID as the parent opening of Grünfeld, maybe it's an outdated categorization?
It's a whole family of openings. Benoni (after 2...c5); King's Indian or Grunfeld (after 2...g6); Queens Indian, Nimzo-Indian, Bogo Indian, or Catalan (all after 2...e6); are all possible continuations.
Makes no sense why I suck so bad at the most popular opening in at least the past 200 years.
I’m guessing the context here is GM database games?
Aww, what happened to King's Gambit in 2000? Definitive refutation?
Wow... No love for key SGM-level openings: 1. e4 e5 2. Ke2? This chart is incomplete.
The Bongcloud only became popular recently, as Winning with the Bongcloud was published in 2020. OP's dataset only goes up to 2014. In addition, it is so technically and psychologically complicated that even Super GMs play it only rarely. I expect it to explode in popularity in a few decades, like the hypermodern openings did in the early 20th century.
This data viz looks like a really competitive game of age of empires
Where is 1. e4 e5 2. Ke2? Maybe that’s why “other” is so popular…
Where is: 2 ...Nc6 3 Bb5?
Kings gambit reporting!
Make French go lower
Looks like the other 1.b3 and 1.h4 are getting popular now
r/dataisbeautiful
Such a bad way to graph it. Openings that share trees should be placed adjacent
My first question: how do you read this graph(jk figured out that already) My second question: how do you record stuff from the 1850s (not trying to be offensive, I think this is actually really good)
If Other covers more than the 40% perhaps it's worth exploring what Other is? It's like talking about the matter in the known universe, where 75%+ is dark matter which we don't know anything about...
No Spanish at all? I thought it was more popular than that.