That missing Elo ratings from the past are tough challenge for any chess
historian is no surprise to anybody. The official FIDE site only provides
ratings from 2000 onwards and benoni.de site allowes to check ratings back
to 1990. Unfortunately due to fact it operates on FIDE IDs it does not
handle player federation transfers well. It does not provide historical
info on deceased players either.
This should no longer be the issue since with the support of many people
of good will OlimpBase men finally compiled complete Elo rating list
1971-2000. Based on official, registered data solely, so no rubbish.
Ratings prior to 1975 were taken from Chessmile site (not available
anymore) while the rest were provided by indispensable Mark Weeks as
appeared in past Informant volumes. See Mark's blog for more details.
Things are not so simple though. Over decades nobody took care of
preserving rating history. To compile the reliable and standarized list is
still a challenge. The provided list does not deal with the problem of
unproper spelling of some of players' names or even some rating
calculation errors which were common in pre-computer era. It is because
the rating lists originate from different sources. Some lists used only
acronyms of first names, and some did not. Spelling is sometimes
inconsistant over years too (very frequent as far as Arab or ex-Soviet
players are concerned). It isn't so bad e.g. with Krasenkov, M following
Krasenkov, Mikhail, but what about Tseshkovsky and Cheshkovsky? Not to
mention that some more complicated names seem to appear in more than two
variations (check e.g. Arne Vinje-Gulbrandsen).
For practical purposes our table should be fine, but for sake of purity,
and probably future incorporation on to FIDE official database, we should
do our best to make the database top quality. So far only names starting
with letter "A" have been standarized. The rest of alphabet still waits
for its turn.
We are looking for wit volunteers who would contribute a few days on
providing the most complete and standarized Elo table database to World's
chess community. Please contact us for details.
Most of corrections needed to be input are fairly simple, like merging
Vilela, J L and Vilela, Jose Luis into one record. More difficult ones may
be discussed separately one by one.
Download Elo tables 1971-2000 file (8,9 MB, includes auxillary file useful
for volunteers only): http://www.olimpbase.org/doc/elo1971-2000.zip
http://www.olimpbase.org
