Statistics for Fairy compositions

In chess composition there is the Fairy Chess, where we see other conditions, others pieces, other chessboards. 

For the question "which fairy elements are mostly used?", a statistic comes to our help, based on the about 785,000 problems that are contained in the database WinChloe by the French Christian Poisson. 

The statistic is published in an article of the very good composer Julia Vysotska:
https://juliasfairies.com/fairy-elements-statistics/

It is important to remember that the fairy elements were not defined at the same year, so the older elements had for more time the opportunity to be chosen for use. 

The statistic shows that there are about 2670 fairy elements (pieces and conditions) and in the first position stands the piece Grasshopper (introduced in 1913) with 14073 compositions containing it!

Blog statistics, fourth year

For the period 07/February/2011 thru 06/February/2012 the tool Google Analytics has collected a multitude of elements, from which I present here some :

Visitors : 6245 (last year : 5962)

Absolutely unique visitors : 4192 (last year : 3586)

Visitors : new 63%, returning 37%.
5 returned over 200 times, 177 returned 101-200 times, 245 returned 51-100 times.
76 visits lasted more than half an hour, other 304 lasted more than 10 minutes and other 400 lasted more than 3 minutes.

Using : 87% Windows, 4% Macintosh, 2,5% i-phone, 2,5% Linux.

Countries of visitors : 974 from United States, 607 from Greece, 322 from Poland, 282 from United Kindom, 263 from Serbia, 361 from Bulgaria, 250 from Spain, 231 from India, 205 from France, 192 from Germany and follow about a hundred countries.

2075 visitors were directed to the site generally.
Some visitors went to spesific posts :
744 Composers and their problems,
335 Sam Loyd (biography),
229 Roman (1),
227 Selfmates (1),
207 Greek Terminology for Problemists,
196 Multiple pawn promotions,
170 Helpmates (1),
159 2nd-FIDE World Cup in Composing 2011,
152 Byron Zappas (biography).


I hope that the content of the posts was useful to the visitors. If anyone is interested for further analysis for his country, I will be glad to answer (until April 30, 2012).
Thank you all!
Manolas Emmanuel
a.k.a. Alkinoos

Blog Statistics, 3rd year

Presented a little bit delayed (but they do not change, of course). For the period 07/February/2010 thru 06/February/2011 the tool Google Analytics has collected a multitude of elements, from which I present here some :

Visitors : 5962

Absolutely unique visitors : 3586

Visitors : Started about 8 per day, increased very slightly but constantly, ended about 16 per day. Only two days had over 50 visitors.

Coming From where : 28% from sites with links to this blog, 58% from search machines, 14% from direct visits.

Countries of visitors : 835 from United States, 690 from Greece, 388 from Bulgaria, 336 from Philippines, 326 from Spain, 257 from Poland, 250 from United Kindom, 191 from France, 190 from Germany, 173 from Serbia, 145 from India, 143 from Brazil, 116 from Nederlands, 110 from Canada, 107 from Indonesia, 105 from Israel, 104 from Italy, 103 from Romania, 87 from Australia, 84 from Slovakia, 81 from Russia, and follow about ninety countries.

Most popular posts : Composers and their problems, Multiple pawn promotions, Dedication for Manolas-60, Terminology for Problemists.

Most popular Biography : Sam Loyd

Returning visitors : 42%, that means 58% are new.
48 returned over 200 times, 259 returned 101-200 times, 239 returned 51-100 times.

84 visits lasted more than half an hour, more 273 lasted more than 10 minutes and more 419 lasted more than 5 minutes.


I hope that the content of the posts was useful to the visitors.
Thank you all!
Manolas Emmanuel
a.k.a. Alkinoos

Blog Statistics, 2nd year

The statistics come from the "Google Analytics" tool, and cover the period [Feb 07, 2009 - Feb 06, 2010], second year of operation of this blog.

In 4335 visits, 2893 unique visitors asked for 7884 pageviews, staying average time on site 1 minute 47 seconds, viewing 1.81 pages per visit.

19.52% of the visitors enter from Greece, 16.06% from United States, 5,24% from Germany, 4.96% from United Kingdom, then follow Poland, Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Serbia, India, Israel, Netherlands, Romania, Czech Republic - a total of 96 territories.

They live in 1085 cities and speak 55 languages.

34.67% are returning visitors, the rest are new visitors. 3.16% of them have returned over 200 times.

Some of the titles attract more attention : Composers of chess problems, Easy win in four moves, Greek Terminology for problemists, World Champioship in Rio de Janeiro, ECSC 2009 in Subotica, Sam Loyd, Helpmates, etc from 332 titles.

47.22% of the visitors use Internet Explorer / Windows, 37.39% use Firefox / Windows, and the rest use various operating systems and devices, even portable phones.

Some more elements are included here :
Biographical details are written for the composers Spyros Bikos, Dimitrios Goussopoulos, Dimitris Kapralos, Vassilis Lyris, Panagis Sklavounos.
A new column started with cooperations of composers (here and here).
An International Contest for Compositions has been announced [Jubilee Tourney Manolas-60].


Thank you all!
Manolas Emmanuel (a.k.a. alkinoos)

Blog birthday (1)

Dear readers, dear friends of this blog,
today one year has passed since I have started the blog http://kallitexniko-skaki.blogspot.com (in Greek language), aiming to cover subjects about chess problems, about composers, about solvers, about solving or composing contests, about Greek problemists gatherings, about circulation of relevant books or magazines.

It is true that such a blog (or a book, as a matter of fact), dedicated to chess problems, was missing from Greece. That means I ought to write posts for all subjects, from very simple to very advanced. So, I have presented solved problems from various solving contests, and I wrote many posts explaining the various Themes. (To add more workload, I have translated the posts to English language in the blog http://chess-problems-gr.blogspot.com, and now these two blogs are synchronized).

If you like to estimate the spread of the published subjects, and how many work hours were spent, please see the reference post "Terminology for Problemists". The terminology contains links to posts relevant to the examined term.

Also, there is a reference post "Composers and their Chess Problems" with links to published-in-this-blog problems for each composer. The solutions of 313 problems were presented, problems created by 24 Greek and 178 foreign composers. Many thanks to composers who have published some of their original problems in this blog, (Emmanuel Pantavos, Nikos Pergialis, and others).

Fourteen biographies were presented for the following chess problem composers : Milan Vukcevich, Byron Zappas, Stavros Iatridis, Ioannis Kalkavouras, Genrikh Kasparyan, Sam Loyd, Lorenzo Mabillis, Emmanuel Manolas, Pavlos Mοutecidis, Carlo deGrandi, Nikos Pergialis, Kostas Prentos, Triantafyllos Siaperas, Harry Fougiaxis.

The content of some posts was enhanced with remarks or cooperations by the following persons : Themis Argyrakopoulos, Ioannis Garoufalidis, Spyros Ilandzis, Kostas Prentos, Panagis Sklavounos, Harry Fougiaxis. Thank you all!

This blog is read by many persons each day, but there are very few comments, mainly praising ones. It is nice that I do not receive irrelevant comments, since I have already said that I will remove them, in order to have in the blog material suitable to be read by children.

I believe that I have done remarkable infrastructure work and I thank all who have recognized it publicly (Schroendinger's Cat, Elias Economopoulos, Panagis Sklavounos, and others). I also thank all who have proposed me and have elected me “Member of the Chess Problem Committee” of the Greek Chess Federation.

For 2009, additionally to the usual material, I will try to promote the easy subjects "Problem Composing", "Publication of Problem", and also the very difficult subject "Chess Lessons in Schools".

I wish to you all : health, joy and success!
Manolas Emmanuel (a.k.a. Alkinoos)