Chessable-supported Researchers at the Saint Louis Chess Conference

Chess researchers, educators, and enthusiasts from over 14 countries and 32 states attended the Saint Louis Chess Conference. The conference featured keynote speakers, plenary sessions, and concurrent sessions focused on chess research and education. Keynote speakers Garry Kasparov, Judit Polgar, and Maurice Ashley are legendary grandmasters and Chessable authors. 

Four of the Saint Louis Chess Conference speakers have Chessable’s support for their chess-themed research: Dr. and Grandmaster David Smerdon, Jade Oldfield, Dr. Jeroen Struben, and Dr. Mark Glickman. Here’s some of what they presented:

Grandmaster and Dr. David Smerdon

Grandmaster David Smerdon is a Chessable course creator. He is also an Assistant Professor of Economics at The University of Queensland. Smerdon and his colleague Dr. Vera te Velde were faculty research co-sponsors for a Chessable Research Award-winning graduate student.

At the Saint Louis Chess Conference, Dr. Smerdon presented “Cheating and Suspicion in Chess: Insights from a Controlled Tournament Experiment.” He listed three motivations for his chess cheating research. First, online chess growth has led to challenges around cheating. Second, high-profile scandals (e.g. Carlsen vs. Niemann; Kramnik vs. Everyone) highlight a cultural shift towards normalizing public accusations. And, third, there is limited data on real cheating behavior in high-stakes games. 

Three of Smerdon’s questions studied in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 are 1. How does cheating affect a player’s in-game quality and behavior? 2. How effectively can players detect cheating? 3. What factors drive cheating beliefs and accusations?

In Experiment 1, eight players were randomly assigned to cheat in selected games in a double round robin tournament. They performed better in games where they cheated. At the end of the tournament, players could increase their tournament score by correctly identifying cheaters, but false accusations lowered their scores. One of the findings from Experiment 1 was “Both cheating and knowing you might be playing a cheater can have strong emotional effects.”

The 112 games generated from Experiment 1 became the dataset for Experiment 2, where 6,769 chess players from 140 countries were asked whether cheating occurred in those games. Analysis of the second experiment’s results is on-going. Smerdon said he hopes to present that analysis at the New York Chess Conference, scheduled for September 2025. See also this Chess.com article about Smerdon’s chess cheating research.

Jade Oldfield

Jade Oldfield is a graduate student at the University of Lethbridge. She won a 2024 Chessable Research Award. At the Saint Louis Chess Conference, Oldfield gave an overview of the Chess for Life program where more than 70 youth offenders each completed 25 hours of chess instruction as part of their probation. Chess for Life is also running programs at senior centers and at an adult correctional facility called Lethbridge Correctional Centre.

Anecdotal success stories about Chess for Life participants may be rooted in their improved executive functions. Oldfield is studying the executive functions in two groups of Chess for Life participants: Youth, ages 12-18, who have been involved with the justice system; and incarcerated adults, ages 18-30, in the Lethbridge Correctional Centre. Oldfield will submit a blog post to Chessable about her results.

Dr. Jeroen Struben

A Chessable featured project by Dr. Jeroen Struben was part of his conference presentation “Embracing complex causality: Dynamics of gender inequality in the world of chess.” Rather than identifying new explanations for the gender gap, his research examines the implications of interactions between existing ones. To do this, Struben conducted a multi-method analysis of competitive chess in the Netherlands. He reviewed literature on factors affecting participation and performance within sports (including chess), gender inequality, sociology, and psychology. He then examined Dutch chess activity from 1994–2020 for the 30,000 individual members, including their period-by-period tournaments played, competitive interactions, Elo performances, and their club memberships. He also conducted interviews with competitive players and coaches. 

His research shows how motivational climate, shaped by one’s peer environment, role model presence, and relative performance, is critical for both player participation and performance. Further, as this in turn affects dropout and future peers and role models, motivational climate is itself also produced by these same factors. He then also quantified the strength of the various relations using the data and estimation methods, including the effect of motivational climate effects on learning rates, dropout, and relative opponent strength for example. 

Existence of several of such two-directional (feedback) relations helps explain persistence of a gender gap in participation and performance, and the difficulty we experience in closing it. However, because such feedback relations can operate in both vicious and virtuous directions, it also means that with sufficient effort across the system and commitment we can partially close this gender gap. His ongoing research, using computational models, focuses on those collective efforts needed to close this gap.

Dr. Mark Glickman

Psychological Science is the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science and is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. In 2006, Psychological Science published a study by Dr. Christopher Chabris and Dr. Mark Glickman which analyzed data from more than 250,000 US Chess-rated players. Chabris and Glickman (2006) found that men have consistently higher ratings than women. They also found that, compared to girls, boys tend to start with higher ratings and to enter competitive chess in greater numbers.

However, in four U.S. ZIP codes where girls participated equally (50%), or had more participation compared to boys, Chabris and Glickman (2006) found that the girls’ ratings among the starting chess players did not differ from boys’ ratings in any statistically significant sense. That “ZIP code” finding, along with other results, suggested a relationship between differing chess participation rates among starting boys and girls and the discrepancy between male and female ratings.

Long before I joined Chessable, I (Alexey Root) had been intrigued by the “ZIP code” finding in Chabris and Glickman (2006). To me, that finding signaled that girls participating less in rated chess than boys is likely why females generally have lower ratings than males. With the support of Chessable, I asked Dr. Mark Glickman if he would update Chabris and Glickman (2006). He did so as a featured project for Chessable in 2022–2023, with then Harvard University undergraduate Angela Li.

At the Saint Louis Chess Conference, Glickman stated that the Li and Glickman 2022–2023 study used a US Chess dataset that included ratings, tournament activity, demographic, and residential data from 1992 to 2019 for over 680,000 players. Li and Glickman found a negative relationship between participation rates among young females and the average rating outperformance of boys relative to girls. This finding means that the gap between boys’ ratings and girls’ ratings trends smaller in geographic areas with higher girls’ participation rates. The results are consistent with the “participation rate” hypothesis, which states that boys and girls have, on average, equal potential, but that greater numbers of boys competing corresponds to greater numbers of boys at the top based purely on random variation.

References

Chabris, C. F., & Glickman, M. E. (2006). Sex differences in intellectual performance: Analysis of a large cohort of competitive chess players. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1040-1046.

Interested in research?

The Chessable Research Awards are for undergraduate and graduate students conducting university-level chess research. Chess-themed topics may be submitted for consideration and ongoing or new chess research is eligible. Each student must have a faculty research sponsor. Applications for the 2025 Chessable Research Awards open on January 15, 2025. For more information, please visit this link.