Further to this post, I was struck by the table given at the top of the Times article to which I linked there. The table is derived from the more comprehensive one given by FIDE, the World Chess Federation, and what I was struck by was the comparatively large number of chess grandmasters in Israel, with so small a population. With about ten times Israel’s population France, for example, has four fewer grandmasters. This prompted me to carry out the following exercise. First, I added Poland (next in the sequence, with 20 grandmasters) to the Times’s table, to make the number of countries up to a round dozen – thus:
Russia 156, Germany 61, USA 60, Ukraine 52, Serbia and Montenegro 49, Hungary 36, England 33, Israel 33, France 29, Spain 24, Bulgaria 23, Poland 20.
Then, taking the populations of all these countries from here (except for England’s which I got from here), I worked out the average population of the 12 countries. (In case you’re interested, it is 66,066,272.) On this basis, I ‘adjusted’ the number of grandmasters per country as if each country actually had that average population, with the same grandmaster/population ratio as now. I am not a statistician, and have no idea whether this is a meaningful exercise; or, even if it is, whether there’s a better, more instructive one. I may also have made errors, though I tried not to. Anyway, here is the adjusted table I’ve obtained:
Israel 347, Serbia and Montenegro 299, Hungary 238, Bulgaria 204, Ukraine 73, Russia 72, Germany 49, England 44, Spain 39, Poland 34, France 32, USA 13.
Not good for the USA. And even worse for the Jews, who are evidently up to no good, as usual. I don’t know, incidentally, how far Israel’s figures are inflated, and Russia’s depleted, by immigrant/emigrant grandmasters. (Well, it keeps me off the streets.)