Abstract

Chess is an emblematic sport that stands out because of its age, popularity and complexity. It has served to study human behavior from the perspective of a wide number of disciplines, from cognitive skills such as memory and learning, to aspects like innovation and decision-making. Given that an extensive documentation of chess games played throughout history is available, it is possible to perform detailed and statistically significant studies about this sport. Here we use one of the most extensive chess databases in the world to construct two networks of chess players. One of the networks includes games that were played over-the-board and the other contains games played on the Internet. We study the main topological characteristics of the networks, such as degree distribution and correlations, transitivity and community structure. We complement the structural analysis by incorporating players’ level of play as node metadata. Although both networks are topologically different, we show that in both cases players gather in communities according to their expertise and that an emergent rich-club structure, composed by the top-rated players, is also present.

Highlights

  • Chess is an emblematic sport that stands out because of its age, popularity and complexity

  • Studying the growing dynamics of the game-tree, we have found that the emerging Zipf and Heaps laws can be explained in terms of nested Yule-Simon preferential growth processes[10]

  • Nowadays there are big active communities of chess players that comprise all levels of expertise playing in both, the traditional over-the-board way and in online portals

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Summary

Introduction

Chess is an emblematic sport that stands out because of its age, popularity and complexity. We complement the structural analysis by incorporating players’ level of play as node metadata Both networks are topologically different, we show that in both cases players gather in communities according to their expertise and that an emergent rich-club structure, composed by the top-rated players, is present. Nowadays there are big active communities of chess players that comprise all levels of expertise playing in both, the traditional over-the-board way and in online portals These very large world-wide communities of chess players produce extensive game records, providing a source of data useful for large-scale analyses. In these databases the expertise of each active player is statistically well characterized through the ‘Elo’ system introduced by the physicist Arpad Elo[13].

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