![]() These "Divinsky numbers" are not on the same scale as Elo ratings (the last person on the list, Johannes Zukertort, has a Divinsky number of 873, which would be a beginner-level Elo rating). Considering games played between sixty-four of the strongest players in history, they came up with the following top ten: In contrast to Elo and Sonas's systems, Raymond Keene and Nathan Divinsky's book Warriors of the Mind attempts to establish a rating system claiming to compare directly the strength of players active in different eras, and so determine the strongest player of all time (through December 2004). He also published the following list of the highest ratings ever attained according to calculations done at the start of each month: Rank In 2005, Sonas used Chessmetrics to evaluate historical annual performance ratings and came to the conclusion that Kasparov was dominant for the most years, followed by Karpov and Lasker. Including data until December 2004, the ratings were: Nevertheless, Sonas' website does compare players from different eras. That is the extent of what these ratings can tell us. So while we cannot say that Bobby Fischer in the early 1970s or José Capablanca in the early 1920s were the "strongest" players of all time, we can say with a certain amount of confidence that they were the two most dominant players of all time. Of course, a rating always indicates the level of dominance of a particular player against contemporary peers it says nothing about whether the player is stronger/weaker in their actual technical chess skill than a player far removed from them in time. Sonas, like Elo, claims that it is impossible to compare the strength of players from different eras, saying: According to Sonas, "As soon as you go a month without playing, your Chessmetrics rating will start to drop." One caveat is that a Chessmetrics rating takes into account the frequency of play. This system takes account of many games played after the publication of Elo's book, and claims to take account of the rating inflation that the Elo system has allegedly suffered. Jeff Sonas' rating system is called "Chessmetrics". Many statisticians besides Elo have devised similar methods to retrospectively rate players. He also stated that the process of rating players was in any case rather approximate - he compared it to "the measurement of the position of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of agitated water with a yard stick tied to a rope and which is swaying in the wind". Įlo said it was futile to attempt to use ratings to compare players from different eras and that they could only measure the strength of a player as compared to their contemporaries. Many people believe that this rise is mostly due to an anomaly known as ratings inflation, making it impractical to compare players of different eras. The average rating of the top 100 players, meanwhile, increased from 2644 to 2703, a 59-point increase. For instance, the average of the top 10 active players rose from 2751 in July 2000 to 2794 in July 2014, a 43-point increase in 14 years. The average Elo rating of top players has risen over time. Table of top 20 rated players of all-time, with date their best ratings were first achieved However, Fischer and Karpov are no longer in the top 20. The high peak ratings of Fischer, Karpov, and Kasparov are notable for being achieved last century (1972, 1994, and 1999 respectively). Īs of December 2015, there were 101 chess players in history who broke 2700, and fourteen of them exceeded 2800. The best-ever Elo ratings are tabulated below. In 1970, FIDE adopted Elo's system for rating current players, so one way to compare players of different eras is to compare their Elo ratings. It did list January 1978 ratings of 2780 for Fischer and 2725 for Karpov. Though published in 1978, Elo's list did not include five-year averages for later players Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. 2690: Alexander Alekhine, Paul Morphy, Vasily Smyslov.2720: Mikhail Botvinnik, Emanuel Lasker. ![]() According to this system the highest ratings achieved were: He gave ratings to players corresponding to their performance over the best five-year span of their career. The best-known statistical method was devised by Arpad Elo in 1960 and elaborated on in his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present. Main articles: Elo rating system and List of chess players by peak FIDE rating
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