Chess Statistics How to? I am a graduate student studying statistics and I play chess once in a while for fun.

I was thinking (just for the fun of it) -- applying some of what I've learned in statistics to chess games: I want to perform statistical analysis of chess games.

Note: My primary purpose is recreation:


Tinkering around
Re-producing earlier works -- for example how much of an advantage does white have over black
Looking at mid-game winning patterns
Etc. etc.


So to that:


I need a large collection of chess games (historic data)
I will then analyze them using R which is a statistical programming language


Question:


I'm looking a collection of games that I can then use as my data set (I would love to get a list of open source chess databases -- commercial chess database might have restrictions on em)
I'm looking for any reference material -- like seminal papers in this area.


Thanks.
I'll leave others to point you a correct database for the games because I'll focus more on the statistical part.

First, you need to ask yourself what you want to analyze. If you don't know, you should really ask yourself what problem you want to address. Your question simply say "I want to do something, but I don't know what to do.". There're infinite ways how a database of chess games can be analyzed. I'll point to you for some areas.


Whether white has an advantage


Given a large data set, if we assume the games are independent we might strip away the draws. Then we might assume a binomial distribution with p=0.5 and try to detect statistical significance. However, this approach assumes that the players are equal.


There's rumor that Carlsen got most of his points from players older than him (last generation like Anand) but suffers against like Caruana and Giri. Is that true?


You might use a two samples-mean t-test or something like that.


Whether Elo rating is really inflated
Given a set of games between two players (or computers), is one player really better than another?


For example, Carlsen has beaten Nakamura many games without a loss. Does it mean Carlsen is a better player? Did that happen because Carlsen was simply lucky.


Correlation between world-number one and world champion


Is there a positive correlation? Are they independent?


Whether the Elo rating system really make sense


There were some articles on Chessbase about it a while ago. I don't remember the names so you'll need google yourself.