Measure Up, with Hans Arild Runde

Live Ratings and the FIDE July List

By Hans Arild Runde

chess@liverating.org

This is the first article in Chessdom's new column 'Measure Up', which will be published semi-regularly. Before turning to today's subject, I would like to thank Chessdom for inviting me to serve as a free-lance writer for this excellent site. I'm probably unknown to the vast majority of Chessdom readers, and as a chess player I'm a typical amateur with a FIDE rating of just above 2000, considering FMs to be almighty chess gurus. I still have two "expert areas" within chess - Magnus Carlsen whose career I've been following closely since 2001, and chess ratings. The latter interest spurred the Live Top List that now lives happily at chess.liverating.org. This rather new site has become quite popular within the chess community - fuelled by breathtaking performances by Ivanchuk and Carlsen - and I've seen hit rates in excess of 12 000 per day lately, with 5-6000 unique visitors.

Besides rating calculations for current top GMs, I've got an attraction to almost all kinds of chess questions that might be partly answered by collecting some data and applying calculations and simple statistics. Most of these, like existence, history and size of inflation as well as comparison of players' performances are related to rating, but obviously there are other interesting areas in chess where numerical measures might shed some light on myths and mysteries. Essentially, these are the kind of topics that will be covered in this column.

What Are Live Ratings?

FIDE publishes official rating lists 4 times each year, in January, April, July and October. Rating calculations for an event are always based on the most recently published rating list and numbers at the starting date of the event. (Details about the rating system of FIDE can be found in the handbook.) This has the desirable and practical property that between two lists, the calculations will remain predictable, events (and even games!) in this period can be rated in any order, and anyone can calculate rating changes for a tournament as long as the starting date is known. This is exactly what I do for the live ratings on chess.liverating.org - once I know a top player has played a FIDE rated game, I calculate the rating changes for that game, using exactly the same formulas as done by FIDE. Hence there is in principle no difference between the live ratings and the FIDE ratings, except of course that FIDE ratings are official and only published 4 times each year, with these published numbers being used for later rating calculations.

Unlike with FIDE, though, no tournament organizers are sending me rating reports or even a notice that they're staging an event with some top dude (or Polgar) playing. (Of course I would be delighted if organizers that approve of the live rating initiative would start sending me a brief note if their event features elite GMs - see email address at the end of the article.) Therefore, there is always a chance that the Live Top List will happen to miss some event played, at least for a period of time. Without the great work of amongst others Mark Crowther/TWIC and several anonymous kibitzers at chessgames.com, it would have been practically impossible to manage the rather large amount of events being played all over the world. Hence, the live rating list is a best effort kind of iniative, but obviously far from infallible.

FIDE July List Preview

Live ratings can be exciting for those who can't get enough of numbers and statistics, but I guess most people now are eager for "the real deal"! The official deadline for submitting rating reports to FIDE for the July List is June 16th. Hence, there is still room for more events to be submitted, but I'm currently not aware of more than one unsubmitted event that is relevant for the 2700-and-above-players of the July list.

Without further ado, Chessdom presents the current best guess of what the FIDE July list will look like:

Notable Changes

The list above includes all relevant events played, with the exception of one (see the next subsection for details). 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), Eljanov (2716), Gashimov (2712), Dominguez (2708), Wang Yue (2708), Nakamura (2704) and Milov (2704) have crossed the somewhat less magical 2700-border - the lesser magic explained by a record-breaking 30 players above 2700.

Events Included and Assumptions Made

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

One interesting omission above, is the 2008 National Open played in Las Vegas last weekend. The two American GMs Kamsky and Nakamura participated in this event that finished June 8th. Kamsky placed shared first and gained almost 3 rating points, while Nakamura had a rather miserable event, with a 2445 TPR, losing 10 rating points. If this event were to be rated for the July list, GM Kamsky's position in the FIDE list would be unchanged, 17th with a rating of 2723, while GM Nakamura would not break 2700 for the first time, but still set a new personal rating record of 2694. As of today, June 15th, the National Open is not registered among US events to be rated for July 2008. This event is included in the Live Top List, though, explaining why Nakamura currently isn't present there.

Another possible difference between the final FIDE July list and the list presented above, is the rating and rank og Chinese Bu. The reason for this, is the game of the final round of the Russian Team Championship, between Sakaeev (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.

There is also some uncertainty pertaining to the ongoing Aerosvit event in Foros, with several top players participating (those with a current live rating of 2700+ are Carlsen, Svidler, Ivanchuk, Shirov, Karjakin, Eljanov, Jakovenko and Alekseev). Aerosvit finishes June 20th and hence shouldn't be included in the July list if FIDE's rules are to be followed strictly. However, big events featuring many elite players like Linares and certain FIDE events like the WCC, have on several occasions been rated despite ending after the official deadline. Still, due to this deadline and Aerosvit not being finished yet, we've chosen to leave it out of today's July list preview. However, if we include the results of the first 6 rounds of Aerosvit, the top ten of a theoretical FIDE list as of June 14th, would look like this:

The most amazing of this table, is of course Magnus Carlsen in 2nd place, 17,5 years old! If Carlsen is able to score +1 in his final 5 games (something he actually is expected to do, and then some, based on his current rating of 2765), he will remain number 2 unofficially, also after the Aerosvit event has ended. If FIDE additionally would choose to rate the event for July, Carlsen would officially be number 2, with a rating of 2790+. Irrespective of this, you can follow further changes to the top standings day by day, by going to chess.liverating.org. 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!

By Hans Arild Runde, chess@liverating.org

Continue reading Measure Up part 2, updated July FIDE rating lists