The Effect of COVID-19 on Female and Male Chess Improvement

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic had a severe impact on the chess community since all the in-person tournaments had to be cancelled, but on the other hand, chess streamers and online chess websites gained much popularity due to the fact that people had more leisure time indoors. This research project is designed to examine gender differences in fluctuation of chess rating through the pandemic. A dataframe in Python was set up and filled up with data of top chess players’ information published on USCF website, followed by exportation of the data to an Excel document where analysis was performed in order to extract the results of monthly rating improvements, and the reasons behind them. In addition, surveys were conducted and responses were collected then coded into graphable data. Findings are showing that while male players outperformed female players in general during pandemic, the opposite took place in terms of the top 5% of chess players. In terms of practice during the pandemic, overall all chess players demonstrated a drastic increase in practice, with female players showing less practice than their male counterparts. This research project shows that chess participation increased significantly both during and after the pandemic. Furthermore, this study provides insights as to the gender imbalance, i.e., female players in the top 5% made more progress than male counterparts. Hopefully the findings of this project become valuable to future research, for example innovating coaching styles tailored to female chess players as compared to male chess players.