India Has 3318 Rated Players

By Arvind Aaron

The January 2008 FIDE Rating list has been published by FIDE. The Elo list comes out four times a year and is an indication who are the best players. Vishy Anand shares the top place in men while Koneru Humpy continues to keep her second place in women behind Judit Polgar with a 2612 rating.

There are four Indians in the World Top 50 in women. A slight slip after Nisha Mohota went out from this narrowed number of best players for women. Certainly this should not deter our medal hopes in the Dresden Olympiad where some have predicted a medal for our women. The biggest loser in the last quarter of 2007 was Dronavalli Harika of Guntur who fell sick in the World Junior and lost the last three games after being it lead. She also lost 25 Elo points though she won many medals in the Macau Asian Indoor Games. The single player to benefit from Harika's loss is Vijayalakshmi who moved from third to second place without playing a single game.

Overall, as a team, India's rank (average of ten best rated players) in the World remains 14th with an average rating of 2604 with Germany and England behind us. Russia, Ukraine and Israel take the top three places. In the World Top we have two players besides Anand (2799). Sasikiran (2677) and Harikrishna (2664) are ranked 39th and 53rd.

With AICF deciding in a meeting on Dec 21, 2007 to select the Indian team for all Chess Olympiads from the rating list, the Elo list becomes an important factor. The latest numbers reveal that names like Ashwin Jayaram and Deep Sengupta are soon to become grandmasters. We are likely to add three grandmasters at a lower end of expectation each year and these two come in mind for 2008.

Indians making the rating list are however the joyous lot from the latest list which has just been released. FIDE lists 131 titled Indians, a good number but still far far behind Russia's 1770 titled players.


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Published on 03rd Jan, 2008