How long are pro chess games

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Anatoly Karpov 1 Ivan Nikolic vs. Goran Arsovic moves Game one is the longest recorded and rated chess game in history. Articles For Beginners. Opening Theory. Amazing Games. Chess Players. Study Plans. Curriculum for Kids. As these games are played by humans, few of them tend to end in checkmate but rather a draw by mutual agreement or a resignation in a lost position.

This may not be the best source, but I've played in over tournaments in my life and many of these games are imported into my personal database. The average number of moves per game is around I do not have access to my Mega Database a database provided by Chessbase at the moment, but I will post the average number of moves of approximately 5 million historical games when I open it. I did this graph based on , games played on the free internet chess server by players with rating above during the last 13 years with non-blitz time controls.

The average length is 79 half moves , the median is 70 and the mode is There are also a lot of very short games due to people resigning early. Update: As it turns out, the above curve can be very well approximated by a log-normal distribution. That is the logarithm of the games lengths are normally distributed. We can then consider the expected game length remaining given how many moves have already been played, which may be interesting for chess engines.

It looks like this:. Again remember, that the result is in half moves. So, on average, we can expect that each player loses 1 piece every 5 moves approximately. After 40 moves, with both "armies" reduced to its half, there is a reasonable expectation that one of them has already lost its king, and so the match is ended. The average length of chess games depends highly on the reflection time schedule since decisive errors happen very often under time pressure. Sahovski Informator publishes approximately of the Best or Most Interesting games of the preceding several months, played by Grandmasters around the world.

I have found the average number of moves in several volumes to converge at between 43 and 44 moves per game. This is, of course, for Grandmasters in tournaments or matches, so they are not giving up easily. Also, interestingly, the number of moves is slowly increasing as time goes forward, indicating perhaps that fewer mistakes are being made, so that games are taking longer. Also, there is a small variation in length based on the openings - e4-e5; d4-d5; d4-nf6; e4-c5 etc, but it doesn't seem significant.

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