Players under the FIDE Flag

In a recent post, FIDE Rating List - January 2024 (January 2024), I wondered where to go next with the data. I decided,

One idea is to look at the doubling of players under the FIDE flag ('FID'). To get started, here are counts of 'FID' players for the past five years:-

2020 : 252
2021 : 254
2022 : 263
2023 : 527
2024 : 798

Those numbers total 2094 players, of which 507 were rated 2000 or above. Of course, some of those players were listed as 'FID' for all five years, but I'll come back to that a bit later.

The key to detecting federation transfers is the FIDE ID, a unique code given to all chess players tracked by FIDE. A few years ago, I documented these codes on a page titled FIDE Country and Federation Codes - 'unofficial' (m-w.com; 'Last updated 2015-03-02'). The FIDE ID is shown in the last column of the table on that page. At the bottom of the page are references to blog posts that documented the creation of the page.

Each federation assigns codes to new players using the federation's FIDE ID as the first two or three digits of the player's unique FIDE ID, which is typically seven or eight digits. That means the player's last five digits are assigned autonomously by the federation, perhaps disconnected from any central FIDE database.

When I worked out the codes for the various federations in 2015, there were no FIDE IDs longer than eight digits. Now there are many codes with nine digits. It appears that FIDE assigns those codes when a new player -- previously unknown to FIDE and having no federation -- starts playing on the FIDE Online Arena (FOA). I eliminated 'FID' players with nine digit codes from the total of 2094 'FID' players counted earlier and arrived at new counts for the five years:-

2020 : 164
2021 : 166
2022 : 166
2023 : 394
2024 : 636

That totals 1526 players. I then counted the number of times each player appeared on the lists over the five years. I counted exactly 700 players distributed as follows:-

5 : 144
4 : 11
3 : 9
2 : 199
1 : 337

In other words, there were 144 players who were on the lists for each of the five years and there were 337 players who were on a list for only one year. Of those 337 players, 291 were on the 2024 list (released in January 2024, covering activity in 2023) and 82 were titled players (GM, IM, etc.).

Next stop: Which federations were responsible for those 82 titled players before they became 'FID' players? When I tackle this question, I'll have to keep in mind the European privacy laws that also apply to any chess player who changed federations.