

Most expert chess games don't end in checkmate - rhiever
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/05/27/a-data-driven-exploration-of-the-evolution-of-chess-moves-captures-and-checkmates/

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dfan
Yeah, no one plays out to checkmate except for gross blunders or to entertain
the crowd. Back in the 19th century it was more common to play things out to
the bitter end. I bet you would find that frequency of checkmate is negatively
correlated with rating, too.

The fact that game length has increased is most likely attributable to
extended endgames (I presume). Thus I would expect this to drive frequency of
captures down (as you observed), not up; there are a finite number of pieces
to be captured, so longer endgames will result in fewer pieces being captured
per move.

The curves of piece movement frequency are interesting. The "popularity" seems
to be a conflation of how much those pieces are moved and how little they are
captured, though. If a piece is captured it can't move for the rest of the
game and will thus appear to be less "popular".

I am as curious as you as to why the rook, knight and pawn curves change the
way they do. Of course the changes are less dramatic than they appear on the
graph (around 5% variation), but that's still interesting. I am sure that they
are not the results of an 1850s book on rook strategy and Fischer changing
chess as we know it, though!

It would be interesting to see the same curves when considering only the first
40 moves or so of each game. Once you reach the endgame, you're going to be
moving the pieces you have left, whether you like it or not, and that can last
for a lot of moves.

