Once a pawn a time Power BI meets chess

Did you ever watch the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, in which the story follows the life of Beth Harmon, a fictional chess prodigy on her rise to the top of the chess world? This series, released in October 2020, didn’t only triple the revenue of chess set vendors during the first months post release but did also spark the enthusiasm of millions of new and returning chess players. Among them: me.

I started playing mainly online. If you’re interested in playing yourself; there are several platforms available such as Lichess, Chess24 and many others. With its 88 million user base at the moment of writing, the platform I found most convincing, was Chess.com.
For the record: you can also play chess in real life, so they say.

Now, two years of chess fun later,
I came across the idea to analyze my own chess games.

As the former Russian world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik ever said:
“Chess is the art of analysis.”
Well, let’s get the journey started!

How much time did I invest?

524 hours of my spare time have been invested… Well, they say practice makes perfect. One thing’s for sure: you’ll only get better at playing chess while investing more time!

How many games did I win, lose or tie?

Having just a few more wins over losses and a draw rate of over 4%, I’m happy with a win rate of almost 48%. Furthermore, I do tend to lose games more often starting with Queen’s Pawn compared to King’s Pawn openings.

What side did I performed better with?

Chess.com makes sure you’ll be starting off with the white pieces as many times as you’ll do with the black pieces. I do have slightly better performance playing with the white pieces resulting in a win rate of 48,51% vs 47,29%.

What opening strategies paid off and what didn’t?

It’s very clear I do prefer to play the Bishops Opening and the Kings Pawn Opening. Over 30% of all games where started with one of these two openings.

The data also tells me I somewhat “mastered” the Vienna Game & the Scandinavian Defense as both openings resulted in a higher win rate.

The Scotch Game and the Three Knights Opening on the contrary, are among the openings I definitely need to dive into some more. Please do take into account the game count as well while interpreting the win rate. Openings you’ve played only a few times can’t be considered representative for all your games.

How did my Chess.com rating change over time?

After receiving the initial grading from Chess.com upon account creation, it goes without saying I did not perform accordingly. After your first games, I can only highly recommend to view some Youtube tutorials which explain several opening strategies in depth. Try to get familiar with 1, preferably 2 opening strategies for each side and keep on playing them. You’ll end up in various situations, enabling you to maintain a steep learning curve. Don’t worry, you’ll still have some periods of rage, resulting in several consecutive losses at that time. But eventually, you’ll get there. If practice makes perfect? Maybe not. But it certainly makes you a better chess player!

This article described one way of visualizing your chess gameplay with Power BI. Of course there are many more insights these reports can be enriched with. I tried to provide a high level summary of how I created this analysis.

If you are interested in playing around or even extending the report even more, feel free to download the report on GitHub.

If you enjoyed reading this article, feel free to connect via LinkedIn or Twitter. All aboard the data train!