2025 ⋆ data analysis ⋆ python · next.js

women in chess 1 in 9

one in nine FIDE rated chess players is a woman. this is a data story about why.

When Netflix released The Queen's Gambit, the chess world expected a revolution. I wanted to know whether any of it showed up in the actual data, so I pulled 130 monthly FIDE snapshots from 2015 to 2026, sampled around 12,000 chess.com profiles, trained a Prophet time series model on pre-show signup data, and ran a Monte Carlo simulation on the gender gap at the elite level.

the show worked. it just turned new fans into online players, not tournament competitors. FIDE could not see the boom because the boom happened somewhere else.

✦ The site gathered thousands of views worldwide, and I was invited to give a talk on it to a London-based chess club. ✦