POORAV KADIYAN: HOW 15-YR-OLD IS REWRITING CHESS SAGA

NEW DELHI: Poorav Kadiyan is a 15-year-old International Chess Federation (FIDE) rated chess player. He is also a self-taught and amateur data scientist, machine learning engineer, web scraper and web developer. Currently, his world ranking is 1408.

Initially, his age became a disadvantage for him. At the age of 12, he started his business and sold his game CDs but this plan flopped. Afterwards, he sold his gaming programs but people underestimated him and this venture again turned out to be a failure. Almost three businesses he started and they all somehow failed. But now Poorav is back with a firm plan which finally turned everyone’s heads.

A website named calculate64.com which can predict your FIDE rating from Lichess, Chess.com or Chess24 rating websites.

Around 95% of chess players are divided between these three sites only. These platforms have their rating system on the basis of which they give ratings to a player.

They mainly used Glicko rating system with some configurations so even when they all use the Glicko rating system but still, there is a difference between their rating systems. However, the problem is that a hobbyist who is playing for years on chess.com does not know whether he should play a FIDE rated tournament or what is his current level. Secondly, the chess players cannot know whether they are improving or not as many coaches fool the players to make money. 

Poorav collected the data of three million chess players playing on Chess.com, Lichess and Chess24 through web-scraping, analysed it and using data science and machine learning made nine prediction models for calculating FIDE rating from any of the ratings of any of the three above-mentioned websites. It is available for use on his website.

Poorav’s future plan is to improve chess infrastructure and eliminate chess coaching fraud.

He is also looking for funding for his next start-up that will help sportspersons to get sponsorships and scholarships.