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On average, what is the age of people when they obtain the title of international master or grandmaster? I also wonder how the age distribution looks like.

Maxwell86
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Brilliant little data mining project!

I used the wiki list of GMs and wrote a quick and dirty script to extract the data. Feel free to use and expand/alter it, if you are interested.

As it turns out, the average age for reaching GM is just above 28. It is, however, skewed by "old" generation players and players from time before GM title was a thing. It was officially introduced in 1950 and some (old) players were awarded it at the time. It is intriguing to look at average age in different generations of players. And so:

  • For players born after 1945, the average is slightly above 26 years old.
  • For players born after 1970, the average is slightly above 23 years old.
  • For players born after 1975, the average is slightly above 22 years old.
  • For players born after 1980, the average is 21 years old.
  • For players born after 1985, the average is just shy of 20 years old.
  • For players born after 1990, the average is 18.5 years old.

Clearly, on average, people are becoming a GM faster nowadays! The age distribution (for players born after 1945) is as follows: chess GM title reached by age

In case it is of interest, the two countries "producing" GMs on average at lowest age are India and China - both at 21 years old. Countries with most GMs (all time) are Russia (by huge margin), Ukraine, Germany, USA and Hungary.

GloriaVictis
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  • Wow, what an answer! Thanks a lot for your time and effort! – Maxwell86 Aug 01 '15 at 06:56
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    Interesting to see that, on average, people are becoming a GM faster nowadays (although this doesn't come as a big surprise). However, I'm not sure how to interpret the averages for younger categories? For example, players born after 1990 are at the moment younger than 25, so it is not possible to become GM at an age of 25+. (Nevertheless, I think it is interesting and useful to make the distinction per "generation" and to see the evolution.) – Maxwell86 Aug 01 '15 at 07:43
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    Fun fact (after a quick manual check of the wiki list): the 2 "record holders", for players born after 1945, are Larry Kaufman and Algimantas Butnorius. Both became GM in the year when they turned 61. Both after winning the World Senior championship, in 2008 and 2007, respectively. – Maxwell86 Aug 01 '15 at 07:55
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    For the entire list, including players born before 1945, it seems that Janis Klovans is the one that became GM at the oldest age (if we discard honorary and retrospective titles). He became GM at 62, after winning the World Senior championship in 1997. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C4%81nis_Klov%C4%81ns – Maxwell86 Aug 01 '15 at 08:13
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    @GloriaVictis Great answer! Any chance you could explain the regex for us plebs? – magd Aug 01 '15 at 19:15
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    A little warning: The averages for the last years (1980--1990) will probably rise with time: When you are born in 1990 you are just 25 years old now and you have lot of time to become a gransmaster ... so don't be too quick with conclusions! – Sir Cornflakes Aug 01 '15 at 19:28
  • @magd Yes, certainly - apologies for late reply, but I was offline last 2 weeks. The regex extracts 3 groups - the year from the date of birth (4 digits), country abbreviation and the year of becoming a GM (4 digits). It looks more complicated than this, since you have to ignore a lot of wiki markup. – GloriaVictis Aug 16 '15 at 08:23
  • Do you have statistics of today's chess players? – Pia Charlotta Peterson Dec 06 '16 at 21:44
  • With regard to the first groups (born after 1945, born after 1970, etc.): do they include all players born after that year, or players born between 1945 and 1970, players born between 1970 and 1975 (respectively), etc? – Tsundoku Dec 07 '16 at 16:13
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    I think @jknappen's last comment made a good point. I asked a question about this over at Cross Validated SE. – Tsundoku Dec 07 '16 at 18:18
  • @GloriaVictis another reason for the 28 vs. 18.5 difference is rating inflation. Becoming a Grandmaster is tied indirectly and directly to FIDE Elo ratings which have been rising, making it (relatively) easier to become a grandmaster today than in the past. The slightly easier criteria makes it a little quicker to reach Grandmaster earlier and earlier than one's peak. – I_play_d4_knights Sep 12 '17 at 14:00