Infographic: Countries With Most Chess Grandmasters

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Have you ever wondered which countries produced more chess grandmasters? Or in which countries are women more interested in chess? Is there a correlation between the population of the country and the number of grandmasters it produced?

The infographic below will answer all these questions:

countries with most chess grandmasters

As you can see, it shows the number of men and women grandmasters for top four countries with the flag dimensions relative to each country’s population size. The data is for valid for December 2018.

As a note, FIDE has two grandmaster titles: “Grandmaster” (GM) and “Women Grandmaster” (WGM). While most women in this chart hold the WGM title, some hold the GM one and some both! They are still counted once though.

This infographic is released under a Creative Commons License / BY-ND, which means please feel free to redistribute it as long as you link back to sparkchess.com and you don’t alter it. You can download high-quality print-quality PDF:

In case you’re curious, here’s the full top 10:

CountryMenWomen
Russia22370
Germany9421
Ukraine8330
United States
89
19
India5316
Serbia5118
China3927
Hungary4816
France499
Spain526
Armand Niculescu

Armand Niculescu is a full-stack developer and creator of SparkChess. He has two BDs in engineering and marketing and a MSc in Management. He's been programming since the age of 12 and he also loves design, photography, and - obviously - chess.

2 Responses

  1. Mzlo
    Mzlo at

    The picture is wrong.
    Women are added to men except for Ukraine.
    Ukraine : 113 + 30 = 143
    Germany : 94 + 21 = 115
    But at the gaphic, Germany counts 115 GM and Ukraine 113 in spite of 143