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| The Year 2002 in Review | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The World's Best Players | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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If chess were a wine, 2002 might not have been a great year, but it was at least a very good year.
Its highlights were a FIDE World Championship final, an Olympiad, and a brave attempt at reconciling the nine-year split in the World Championship title.
Like almost any recap of events in modern chess, this article owes a big debt to Mark Crowther's The Week in Chess (see the link on the right).
One complicating factor in preparing a yearly review is that chess, as an international game, is played in all countries.
As much as one would like to mention all national championships, this is not feasible, and would risk resembling a laundry list.
Having said that, if you believe strongly that something important has been overlooked, send an email -or- even better, post a message in the About Chess forum, linked at the top of the page.
Let's start by listing the world's top players, as announced quarterly by FIDE.
Kasparov, Kramnik, and Anand held their number 1, 2, and 3 rankings throughout the year, although Anand was never far ahead of the rest of the top ten. Twelve names appeared on the list at least once during the year. Nine names appeared on every list; of the rest, Bareev took Shirov's place, while Gelfand barely made the list by tying for 10th place in April. In May, 64 Magazine awarded the Chess Oscar for 2001 to Kasparov, who gathered 3943 points. He was followed by Kramnik (2970) and Ponomariov (2959). Also worth noting are the record breaking performances of two future champions. Sergey Karjakin of the Ukraine became the youngest Grandmaster (GM) ever at the age of 12 years 7 months and 2 days. Humpy Koneru of India became the youngest woman to achieve the Men's GM title, beating Judit Polgar's record. Next : World Championship 2002
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