Forty-five out of three hundred and ten

I · The steps

A country where chess is played at fourteen

Chess has a property rare among the things we do for pleasure: it hands you a single number and keeps it. A child enters the records at nine with eleven hundred points and stays on the same list at sixty, under the same player code. That makes possible a count which in other fields would only ever be a hunch: you can go person by person and see who is still standing on each step.

Romania now has 2,194 players with a standard rating who have sat down to a rated game within the past year. Nine hundred and sixty-six of them are under eighteen, which is 44% of the total. The most crowded single year of age is fourteen, with one hundred and twenty-three players, and they outnumber everyone aged 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 and 33 put together, who come to one hundred and twenty-one.

Between eighteen and nineteen, the number of active Romanian players falls from one hundred and four to forty-seven. In Hungary the same step goes from eighty-one to seventy-seven.

The staircase has a second peculiarity, visible only once you go all the way down. Romania has 197 active players aged twenty-five to thirty-nine, about thirteen in each year of age, and 324 aged forty-five to fifty-nine, about twenty-two. Chess here is played by children and by people who were already adults twenty years ago, and the generation in between is almost absent.

Pick a country below and lay it over Romania. Hungary has 624 active players aged twenty-five to thirty-nine, over three times as many as we do, with half our population. There, as in Czechia, Croatia or Serbia, the staircase has a middle; ours is thin in the middle, and what remains visible is the bulge at fourteen.

II · The same people, ten years on

The rating stays on the list even when the player stops coming

The picture above shows a state, and a state can be explained in many ways. It could be, for instance, that Romania has only recently begun bringing large numbers of children into competition and they have not yet reached the ages where adults are counted. The player code allows a harder question: take the people who were playing on a given date and check, one by one, who is still playing today.

Of the 310 Romanian players born between 1998 and 2002 who held a rating and were playing in August 2016, 45 still play. The other 265 remain on the list with their ratings intact, marked inactive. Exactly one moved to another federation. Leaving chess did not happen by moving abroad; it happened by stopping.

The same count, run for every federation with enough players in the cohort, places Romania near the bottom of Europe. Change the period and the starting level to see how well the ranking holds.

III · The starting level

The better the junior, the wider the gap

You would expect most weak children to disappear anywhere in the world, since many of them enter the records after a single school tournament. What matters is what happens higher up. In a federation with club life, the chance of still playing ten years later rises with the level: in Hungary it climbs from fifteen to forty-two per cent, then to fifty-four and seventy-five. In Czechia, from twenty-one to seventy-one.

Romania climbs to a point and stops there: seven, twelve, thirty-two and thirty-two per cent. The two upper steps, the safest ones everywhere else in Europe, are here exactly as unsafe as each other.

IV · Your step

Where your own number would put you

A rating says, in principle, one thing only: how likely you are to beat someone else. Set beside a whole country, it also says how empty the place you stand in is. Move the two sliders and see. If you have never played rated chess, twelve hundred points is roughly the level of someone who knows the rules and has played a few hundred games on a phone.

V · The girls

Ninety-seven adult women

Of Romania's 2,194 active players, 305 are women. Of those, 208 are under eighteen, which is 68%; among the men, children make up 40% of the total. The drop that all of Europe sees at the end of secondary school happens here too, only on a far smaller base and with a far more visible result: ninety-seven adult women players remain in the whole country, one per roughly 196,000 inhabitants.

The top of the women's game exists and is ageing well. The country's leading woman player, Irina Bulmaga, holds 2,350 points, and the second is Corina-Isabela Peptan, born in 1978 and still active at forty-eight. Five woman grandmasters are still playing. What is missing is the layer between them and the twelve-year-olds: the neighbourhood club where a woman of thirty-five enters a weekend tournament because there is somebody to play.

VI · The summit

The summit is fine

Nothing counted above says Romania has stopped producing good players. Bogdan-Daniel Deac, born in 2001, holds 2,651 points and is the country's first board; he happens to be one of the forty-five who remain from the group followed here. David Gavrilescu, born in 2003, holds 2,537. Of the twenty-four Romanian grandmasters, sixteen have played within the past year. The generation coming up now includes an eighteen-year-old, Filip Magold, at 2,503 points, and a sixteen-year-old, Felix-Antonio Ilinca, at 2,494.

A summit can be held up by a few dozen talented people and their coaches. A community needs something else, and that is exactly where the shortfall shows. Romania's 685 active adults would fit inside a medium-sized village, and they are the ones who would have to supply the weekend tournaments, the clubs that survive a decade, and the opponents for children finishing school.

A nineteen-year-old who wants to keep playing needs people to beat. The list says roughly how many there are: in each single year of age between twenty-five and thirty-five, between eight and twenty-four active players in the entire country.