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FIDE Top-10 Players (1975-2004)

Using FIDE historical ratings we identify world Top-10 players over the last 30 years.

(February 2004) Every form of individual competition has some kind of ranking to determine the best in the world, the second best, and so on. Some sports -- tennis comes to mind -- use recent match performances to rank the top players. Other sports -- golf is a good example -- use prize money as a guide. Since 1970, chess has used the Elo rating system to rank world class players. Thanks in large part to our position as About Chess Guide, we received permission from Chess Informant and from the World Chess Federation (FIDE) to release copies of FIDE rating lists for the years 1975 to 2000. If you're also interested in FIDE historical ratings, these files are available offsite (see the link box at the bottom of this article) for download. Since the FIDE site (link box again) has rating archives for the years 2001 through 2004, we were able to construct a database of all FIDE ratings covering the 30-year period 1975 to 2004. We'll be doing a series of articles using our database to present some new statistics about the players covered by the files. In this article we start with the world's best players : the Top-10 players on each annual list. How many players have been ranked in the Top-10 and how often were they ranked there? We counted a total of 50 different names, presented in the following table. An explanation of the columns follows the table. Name Ct FirstYr LastYr MaxElo Best Adams 5 1999 2003 2746 4 Anand 13 1992 2004 2790 2 Andersson 6 1982 1991 2640 4 Balashov 1 1979 1979 2600 10 Bareev 6 1991 2003 2729 5 Beliavsky 9 1981 1998 2690 4 Ehlvest 1 1991 1991 2650 5 Epishin 1 1994 1994 2675 10 Fischer 1 1975 1975 2780 1 Gelfand 7 1991 1997 2700 3 Geller 2 1976 1981 2620 8 Georgiev 1 1993 1993 2660 9 Gheorghiu 1 1980 1980 2605 10 Gurevich,M 3 1988 1991 2650 5 Hort 4 1977 1984 2620 6 Huebner 7 1975 1987 2635 4 Ivanchuk 14 1989 2002 2740 3 Kamsky 11 1991 2003 2735 4 Karpov 25 1975 1999 2770 1 Kasparov 23 1981 2004 2851 1 Khalifman 1 1991 1991 2640 10 Korchnoi 14 1975 1990 2695 2 Kramnik 12 1993 2004 2809 1 Larsen 6 1975 1982 2625 6 Leko 5 2000 2004 2745 5 Ljubojevic 7 1975 1990 2645 3 Mecking 6 1976 1982 2635 3 Miles 1 1986 1986 2610 9 Morozevich 5 1999 2004 2748 4 Nikolic 1 1988 1988 2630 6 Nunn 2 1985 1989 2620 9 Petrosian,T 8 1975 1983 2645 2 Polgar,J 2 1996 2004 2728 8 Polugaevsky 10 1975 1985 2645 3 Ponomariov 3 2002 2004 2734 6 Portisch 13 1975 1987 2655 2 Ribli 3 1980 1989 2625 8 Salov 7 1989 1995 2715 3 Shirov 13 1992 2004 2751 2 Short 6 1987 1997 2690 3 Sokolov,A 1 1987 1987 2645 3 Spassky 11 1975 1987 2640 3 Speelman 2 1988 1989 2640 4 Svidler 3 1998 2004 2747 4 Tal 10 1975 1988 2705 2 Timman 8 1979 1990 2680 2 Topalov 7 1996 2004 2743 4 Vaganian 4 1984 1988 2645 3 Yudasin 1 1991 1991 2645 8 Yusupov 3 1986 1992 2655 3 Ct : The number of times a player appeared in the Top-10. FirstYr : The first appearance in the Top-10. LastYr : The last appearance in the Top-10. Players with '2004' are in the current Top-10. MaxElo : The highest Elo achieved by a player on a Top-10 list. Best : The highest position on a Top-10 list; '1' means world no.1. Where players had equal ratings, the 'Best' is the rank as a group. For example, Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik tied for no.1 & no.2 in 1996 with identical 2775 ratings. Both are counted as No. 1 for the year. Since our calculations are based on the January rating list for each year, it's entirely possible that we missed a few players who only appeared on Top-10 lists for the intermediate periods. Our investigations also uncovered a whole slew of issues which we'll cover in a future article!

Related Resources • Famous Chess Players (offsite) • Chess Ratings • FIDE  Elsewhere on the Web (offsite) • FIDE historical ratings • FIDE • Chess Informant