Most common destination squares from one million chess games

I'm in the process of writing my own piece square tables (PST) for my chess engine littlewing and I decided to try to extract some statistics from a PGN database.

The best I could find was KingBase Lite with almost a million games with ELO > 2200.

So I wrote a little script to count the most common destination squares from every moves and here's the result:

Opening (loosely defined as more than 16 pieces remaining on the board):

Endings (16 pieces or less):

I can't use those values directly for my PST, but still it's interesting, we can visually confirm a lot of rules from the images.

Tags: chess