Leung Weiwen, an undergraduate at Singapore Management University found that there was a relationship between a country’s population, GDP per capita and how well the country did at chess. Some of the findings of the paper include:

• Armenia, Georgia and Moldova are the clearest outliers. Their players do a lot better than their population size or GDP per capita would suggest.
• South Korea, the Bahamas and Guyana do a lot worse than their population size or GDP per capita would suggest
• At best, population size and GDP can only explain about 40% of a country’s success at Chess

You can read the full paper over here.

Source: Chessbase

Via: Marginal Revolution