GM Magnus Carlsen made it back-to-back victories as he claimed the $250,000 top prize in the 2026 Esports World Cup in Paris. We take a look back at an event that also featured brilliant performances by teenage stars GMs Denis Lazavik and Sina Mov...
For the typical player in the corpus, 24.9% of the games in which they reached an advantage of at least three pawns finished with the evaluation back at level or worse, measured over 237 players and 281,948 such games.
The middle half of players sit between 20.4% and 30.7%, so this is a habit nearly everyone has rather than a few people dragging an average. Pooling every game instead gives 25.3%, near enough the median that no one prolific account is carrying it. Only positions from move five onward count as the peak, so opening noise cannot qualify as winning, and the endpoint is the final evaluation rather than the result, which also turns on the clock.
Across 281,948 analysed games from 237 players.
In the Zukertort Opening, the Lichess archive holds 77.8M club games (1600–2000) that reach this position. The top reply d5 is chosen 35% of the time and scores 46% for Black.
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