Other FIDE Titles

While I was working on the post about Countries with World Top-100 Players, I noticed there was a new field in the FIDE rating data that I hadn't seen before: 'Other Titles'. These are titles beyond the familiar GM, IM, etc. I wondered how many of these other titles there are and made a little query to count them. The results are shown in the table on the left.

What do the acronyms in the table stand for? The last letter tells us the type of title (I'm working from memory here):-

• A : Arbiter
• I : Instructor
• O : Organizer
• T : Trainer

The first letter tells us the level of the title:-

• F : FIDE
• I : International
• N : National

From this we can work out that FA means 'FIDE Arbiter' and IO means 'International Organizer'. A couple of the titles don't fit the pattern. DI means 'Developmental Instructor', while FST means 'FIDE Senior Trainer'.

What do these titles mean in terms of knowledge? A web search on 'chess fide' plus the relevant title leads to an explanation. As for the difference between an instructor and a trainer, I'll work that out some other time.

Which federations are pursuing these titles? Here are the top ten of the 117 federations with at least one title:-

• RUS : 112
• GRE : 108
• IND : 103
• ESP : 88
• TUR : 82
• HUN : 63
• SRB : 54
• GER : 53
• FRA : 50
• USA : 48

These counts are subject to the same problems I discussed in the 'Countries Top-100' post; entire countries are missing from the rating lists. Some players / officials have more than one title, with 11 currently having three. These people are counted for their federations once for each title.