Elsewhere on the Web : FIDE World Championship - Underway!

Saturday October 1, 2005

The FIDE World Chess Championship started without a hitch on 28 September in San Luis, Argentina. The first round saw two wins by the Black pieces -- Veselin Topalov beat Peter Leko and Viswanathan Anand beat Judit Polgar -- while the other players drew. We'll be following the action daily in the About Chess forum where you are welcome to comment on the progress (see Join the Discussion : 2005 FIDE World Championship). While we were waiting for more results, we wondered about the relative popularity of the eight participants.

Using the same technique we introduced in Google Games - World Chess Champions, we searched Google on the keyword 'chess' plus the player's full name. For example, a search on India's favorite son returned 72,300 results for chess "Viswanathan Anand". • After that we worked through a selection of the players' puzzles from WTHarvey's incomparable Chess Puzzles by GMs. The Google results plus a link to the puzzles for each player are given in the following table.

• 72,300 GM Viswanathan Anand : Puzzles
• 62,500 GM Judit Polgar : Puzzles
• 57,300 GM Peter Leko : Puzzles
• 55,800 GM Michael Adams : Puzzles
• 35,200 GM Veselin Topalov : Puzzles
• 32,600 GM Peter Svidler : Puzzles
• 28,300 GM Alexander Morozevich : Puzzles
• 19,200 GM Rustam Kasimdzhanov : Puzzles

How do the popularity numbers compare with other World Champions of the past decade? Glad you asked!

• 274,000 GM Garry Kasparov
•   97,200 GM Vladimir Kramnik
•   81,400 GM Anatoly Karpov
•   31,200 GM Ruslan Ponomariov
•   25,700 GM Alexander Khalifman

For our preliminary reports on the FIDE World Championship see Elsewhere on the Web -- The Players (17 September), and Introduction (24 September).

Index of all World Championship blog posts