Chess World Championship Data

The FIDE World Chess Championship is just under a month away! In anticipation of the event I wanted to take a closer look at the data from the games of World Champion Magnus Carlsen. In particular the games from his previous title matches. The following data has been collected and aggregated via an application I wrote and published: Chess World Championship Data. It's currently in it's first version with upgrades launching prior to the upcoming match.

Overall Record



First of all, his overall record through 3 matches is fairly astounding. In 37 total games played over 3 matches, he's only lost twice! Scoring 9 wins and 26 draws. The two defeats are split between the pieces with one each as white and black. With the white pieces he holds a winning percentage of 31% while overall Magnus wins about 1 in every 4 games he plays in the world championship.

Positional Data

He's only played one game with an IQP (isolated queen pawn) and he won it. He's never lost playing against one and both of his losses in the world championship come in games where no IQP position occurred.

In regards to the bishop pair, he's never lost a game when one side achieves the pair and like the IQP his two losses come when this imbalance is not present. Notable here is the amount of times he has either given up or lost the bishop pair compared to keeping them and how well he's played against them, +6-0=10.

He's never lost a game with a fiancetto'd bishop and has one loss when his opponent fiancetto's. His only other loss came when neither player put the bishop on the long diagonal. To see all the positional data for Magnus including piece and exchange sacrifices click here.

Opening Choices

Here are Magnus' first move choices In 19 total games with the white pieces:

e4: 14, d4: 2, Nf3: 2, c4: 1

Eight of his 19 games as white have been some variation of the Ruy Lopez.

Fun Fact

Can you guess which Ruy variation has been most frequently played in the world championships?

C84: Ruy Lopez, Morphy Defense, Closed.

21 Games have been played from the position and not a single win for the black pieces! For the full data on this opening variation click here.



They Ruy itself (C60) has occurred 169 times and most frequently by Lasker with 36 total games.

I hope you enjoyed taking a look at this data, I for one can not wait for this match to start! Feel free to mess around on the web app and let me know what you think in the comments. I am aware of some current bugs, I'm just a one man show doing it because I love it so please hang in there with me and feel free to make suggestions on how to improve the user experience etc... I appreciate all feedback.