4 ms·
Most expert chess games don't end in checkmate
- dfan 12y agoYeah, no one plays out to checkmate except for gross blunders or to entertain the crowd. Back in the 19th century it was more common to play things out to the bitter end. I bet you would find that frequency of checkmate is negatively correlated with rating, too. The fact that game length has increased is most likely attributable to extended endgames (I presume). Thus I would expect this to drive frequency of captures down (as you observed), not up; there are a finite number of pieces to be captured, so longer endgames will result in fewer pieces being captured per move. The curves of piece movement frequency are interesting. The "popularity" seems to be a conflation of how much those pieces are moved and how little they are captured, though. If a piece is captured it can't move for the rest of the game and will thus appear to be less "popular". I am as curious as you as to why the rook, knight and pawn curves change the way they do. Of course the changes are less dramatic than they appear on the graph (around 5% variation), but that's still interesting. I am sure that they are not the results of an 1850s book on rook strategy and Fischer changing chess as we know it, though! It would be interesting to see the same curves when considering only the first 40 moves or so of each game. Once you reach the endgame, you're going to be moving the pieces you have left, whether you like it or not, and that can last for a lot of moves.