Into the Melting Pot

Let's squeeze one more post out of the January 2015 FIDE rating list. In GM Players and Their Mobility, I developed a chart showing the number of GMs in strong federations and counting the number of federations where those GMs started their careers. While there are some surprising results there -- ENG and ISR have no foreign GMs (at least in the 15 years since FIDE started assigning FIDE IDs to individual players) -- the most interesting numbers are for the USA, which has 84 GMs from 14 different federations.

I'm the type of person who likes to check and doublecheck everything, especially numbers, and I decided to look at the USA numbers in more detail. The chart on the left shows the USA data broken down further, adding IM counts to the GM data.

The second column is the key to the table. It is extracted from the FIDE ID and shows which federation initially registered a player with FIDE. The top row shows that most of the USA players have spent their entire careers in the U.S., and accounts for most of the USA numbers. No surprise there.

The 'GM' column confirms the numbers in that previous 'Mobility' post, and shows where the other, non-USA players originally played. For example, four strong players now listed as USA originally came from Cuba and four from Georgia. As a further check and doublecheck, here is a list of the four players from Cuba. The first data item is the player's FIDE ID.

3501728; Becerra Rivero, Julio; USA; GM
3506690; Corrales Jimenez, Fidel; USA; GM
3501841; Gonzalez, Renier; USA; GM
3504387; Hernandez Carmenate, Holden; USA; GM

Before signing off for today, I'll list all of the recent posts in the rating series:-

• 2015-01-13: FIDE Rating Lists Restored
• 2015-01-20: Federations in Arrears
• 2015-01-27: Titled Players and Their Ratings
• 2015-02-05: Titled Players and Their Continents
• 2015-02-12: GM Players and Their Mobility
• 2015-02-16: FIDE Country and Federation Codes
• 2015-02-19: Inaccurate Data on the Rating List
• 2015-02-23: FIDE ID Prefix and Federations

Thanks, FIDE, for restoring the rating lists!