Final FIDE July List top ratings estimate

Measure Up, with Hans Arild Runde (June 20th)

And the saga continues... I must admit that trying to predict what FIDE will do, sometimes feel like trying to hit a moving target! After yesterday's rumors, it seemed certain that Aerosvit would be included in the FIDE July list. And in their reply today, FIDE's positive response to the request concerning Aerosvit is duly documented. However, it's also communicated that in a second response, FIDE announces that they are going to enforce the deadline for rating report submissions strictly this period, and hence Aerosvit will not be included in the July list!

We therefore bring another updated July list estimate, quite similar to the one published June 17th. It has one additional change, though, which is the inclusion of the 2008 National Open in Las Vegas. See below for a few more comments in that respect. We would also like to emphasize that this is an estimate - there still might be changes unknown to us at the current time, but this is the final July list preview that Chessdom will publish. Any further changes will as usual be communicated in the tournament section of the Live Top List, so please drop by now and then to see what's happening!

FIDE July List Preview

Notable Changes

The list above includes all relevant events played. In the top of the list, we see that Morozevich has caught up with Kramnik, who hasn't played any games in this rating period. The reason for Morozevich being ranked ahead of Kramnik despite them having the exact same rating, is FIDE's tie-break criteria, which is number of games played. Moro won the big majority of his 14 point gain by winning Bosna Sarajevo in style, while snatching the final points needed in the Bosnia Herzegovina league competition. Ivanchuk has made a huge leap upwards after several strong events, mainly his break-out win in MTel, with a TPR of 2977 after an undefeated 8/10. The same event was miserable for Aronian, who ended up dropping out of top 10 for the first since time since April 2005. Topalov and Carlsen gained around 10 points each, but both were pushed one place down due to Ivanchuk's big leap.

In the lower half of the list, we can welcome several players to the 2700 club, most of them for the first time: Since the April list, Movsesian (2723), Gashimov (2717), Eljanov (2716), Dominguez (2708), Milov (2705) and Wang Yue (2704) have crossed the somewhat less magical 2700-border - the lesser magic explained by a record-breaking 29 players above 2700.

Events Included

The events being the basis for the July preview above, are the following:

Possible Deviations from the Final List

A possible difference between the final FIDE July list and the list presented above, is the rating and rank of Chinese Bu. The reason for this, is the game of the final round of the Russian Team Championship, between Sakaev (white) and Bu (black). The rating report submitted to FIDE has this game as a win for Bu, while every source I've seen, has this game as a draw, including the official site of the Russian Team Championship. The pgn of this game can be downloaded from chess.liverating.org. If there still is some twist to the result of this game, making the rating report correct after all, Bu would appear in 23rd place with a rating of 2710 instead, pushing everyone between Polgar and Bu down one place in the rankings.

In a previous article, we mentioned the missing rating report from the recent Las Vegas event, sporting top US GMs Kamsky and Nakamura. And as of June 17th, the 2008 National Open was not registered on FIDE's site among US events to be rated for July 2008. However today, June 20th, it has been added, reporting a submittal date of June 15th. One must assume that FIDE simply lagged behind in updating their web pages, which can be seen as quite understandable, with lots of reports probably coming in close to the deadline.

You can follow changes to the top standings day by day, by going to chess.liverating.org, where ratings are updated "live", irrespective of when events will be counted in FIDE's official lists. If there are questions, comments or suggestions to this article or the Live Top List, I'll be delighted to read and respond to those, either via email or in a future article. Until then, have a nice time!

The author can be contacted at chess@liverating.org