Investigation into the most common openings used in the FIDE Candidates 2022, and how well they performed. Full write-up here.
The FIDE Candidates Tournament is well known to be the peak of opening preparation, second only to the FIDE World Championship itself. The participants do not hold anything back in terms of opening prep, as the biggest prize in all of chess is on the line: an opportunity to play for the title of World Champion.
Dataset of all games, in PGN form, were downloaded from Lichess and can be found in the /data directory.
Figures can be found in the /figures directory.
Source code lives in the /src directory.
All data parsing and plotting done using Python. python-chess used to parse PGN data, pandas used to clean and process data, and plots made using matplotlib.
For a full discussion of the results, see the post on my website.
This project was carried out using Python version 3.10.3
Local usage is straightforward. Clone the repository, install dependencies in a virtual environment and run the main.py file from the project's root directory.
$ git clone https://github.com/emilioziniades/candidates-2022-openings/
$ cd candidates-2022-openings
$ python -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python src/main.pyThis will generate three charts in the /figures folder, overwriting the existing charts.