The classical portion of the Zurich Chess Challenge 2014 is over. The worlds two top rated players have been showing off lately. Second ranked Levon Aronian won the very strong Tata Steel tournament with a full 1.5 point lead over the two players tied for 2nd & 3rd, but proved he was fallible by losing his last round game. Likewise, in the Zurich super-tournament Aronians only loss came in the last round, but it was still good enough for 2nd place. On the Live Ratings Aronian sits at 2830.1 (it was 2835.5 before he lost his last round game to Fabiano Caruana). Aronian has pushed himself to the highest rating he has ever had (his official rating on the February 2014 rating list is 2826). However, once again, the worlds top rated player appears more god-like than man-like. Magnus Carlsen narrowly missed defeat at the hands of Hikaru Nakamura in round 3, and had an easy draw against Anand, the man he recently made a former World Champion, in the last round. Carlsen was the only undefeated player in a field where all 6 players are rated in the worlds top 10, scoring +3 =2 -0. On the Live Ratings list, Carlsen sits at 2881.2 (it was 2882.6 before he dropped 1.4 points for merely drawing with Anand in the last round). This is once again the highest rating ever seen for anyone (his official rating on the February 2014 FIDE list is 2872, which he also scored on the February 2013 rating list, and is the highest FIDE rating ever held by anyone). Now that Carlsen is World Champion and walking all over everybody, whats next? Well, 2881 is only 19 points shy of 2900. Will Carlsen be the first chess Grandmaster to have a rating over 2900? Last November he turned all of 23 years old, so theres a pretty good chance this could happen. But on the FIDE list he is already 46 points ahead of world #2 Aronian, 85 points ahead of world #3 Kramnik, and 111 points ahead of World #10 Gelfand. One could argue reasonably that he is literally in a class by himself, as was Kasparov at his peak. Even draws cost him rating points, so the mere 19 points to 2900 are harder to gain than they look. Still, Carlsen is the first to come along with a serious chance at it. en.chessbase/post/zurich-05-caruana-strikes 2700chess/ ratings.fide/top.phtml?list=men
Posted on: Tue, 04 Feb 2014 18:04:12 +0000
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