Chess Number 1 Player

[Jaunita Rousu]

Thefirst world number one, in July 1971, was Bobby Fischer. In January 1976 Anatoly Karpov became the highest-rated player on the FIDE list, FIDE having dropped Fischer (whose rating was higher than Karpov's) from the list due to inactivity. In January 1984, Garry Kasparov became the third world number one. He would dominate for 22 years from 1984 until his retirement from professional chess on 10 March 2005, with three brief interruptions: Anatoly Karpov briefly held the world number one ranking again in July 1985, as well as during 1994 when FIDE excluded Kasparov from the list; and the fourth world number one, Vladimir Kramnik, briefly held the ranking in January 1996. In January 1990, Kasparov surpassed Fischer's peak of 2785 and became the first player ever to achieve a 2800 rating. In July 1999, he reached his peak rating, 2851. This was the highest FIDE rating in history until January 2013, when it was surpassed by Magnus Carlsen.

On Kasparov's retirement, the world number one ranking passed to Veselin Topalov, since Kasparov was removed from the rating list in April 2006 due to inactivity. In April 2007, Viswanathan Anand became the sixth player to top the rankings.[2] Kramnik briefly returned to the number one ranking in January 2008, but was again joint number one by rating, being placed first in the list due to having played more games in the rating period in question. For most of the period April 2007 to November 2009, the top ranking was held by either Anand or Topalov. The seventh and current world number one is Magnus Carlsen, who first achieved this ranking in the January 2010 list, and has been world number one since July 2011 after having lost and reclaimed the position from Anand during 2010 and 2011.

Publication of the rating lists in the 1970s and 1980s was in Chess Informant and other chess publications. The number of games played by individuals during the rating period was added to the lists from July 1985 onwards. Player ID numbers were used from January 1990. From January 1999, the practice of rounding to the nearest five Elo points was discontinued, and ratings were then rounded to the nearest Elo point for publication. From July 2000 onwards, the ratings are available from the FIDE website.[1]

In January 2010 former World Champion Boris Spassky criticized the current emphasis on ratings rather than World Champions.[3] Although Spassky was World Champion during the inception of the FIDE rankings in 1971, he never became the number-one rated player in the world; since July 1971 he, Vladimir Kramnik, and Ding Liren (the current Champion) are the only undisputed World Champions to never become ranked world number one during their tenure as champions as of September 2023.[update] (Kramnik has been ranked number one, but never while he was champion.)

The following is a list of the players ranked number one on the FIDE rating system from the first official list in July 1971 to the present day, along with their ratings during the periods in question. A rating denoted with bold text followed by an asterisk (*) is a career high rating.

Seven players have held the world number one ranking over a period of 53 years and 1 month, encompassing 248 rating lists. These seven players include six undisputed world chess champions, with Topalov being the only player to achieve the number one ranking without becoming undisputed world champion, though he was FIDE world champion from 2005 to 2006, and is still an active player. Spassky, Kramnik, and Ding are the only world champions in the period in question to never have been world number one while being champion. (Of these, Kramnik has been world number one, but only when he was not champion; Spassky and Ding were never world number one.)

Fischer was top of the lists successively five times over a period of 4.5 years, though he is considered to have already become the number one player in the world before the official list started, as he topped the unofficial list in 1970. Karpov topped the list 14 times, successively 11 times over a period of 8 years, once for 6 months, and once for a year while Kasparov was excluded. Kasparov was world number one on the official list 52 times over a period of 22 years, and 31 times successively over nearly a decade from July 1996 to January 2006; he was number one 3 times successively over 1.5 years, then 16 times successively over 8 years, then twice successively for one year, and then finally 31 times over 9 years and 9 months. Kramnik was world number one 2 times (for 6 and 3 months), for a total of 9 months. Topalov was world number one successively 4 and 6 times (a total of 10 times), for 12 months and 15 months respectively (for a total of 27 months). Anand was world number one successively 2 and 3 times (a total of 5 times), for 6 months and 9 months respectively (for a total of 15 months). As of September 2023,[update] Carlsen has been world number one a record 147 times, including a record 141 consecutive times since July 2011.

The following is a list of the players ranked number one female on the FIDE rating system from the first official list in July 1971 to the present day, along with their ratings during the periods in question. A rating denoted with bold text followed by an asterisk (*) is a career high rating.

FIDE publishes lists of highest-rated junior chess players; a "junior" is defined as being a player who is aged under 20 at the start of the year. The following is a list of the players ranked number one junior in the FIDE rating system from July 1999 to the present day, along with their ratings during the periods in question.

FIDE publishes lists of highest-rated girl chess players; a "girl" is defined as being a player who is aged under 20 at the start of the year, and female. The following is a list of the players ranked number one girl in the FIDE rating system from January 2000 to the present day, along with their ratings during the periods in question.

Why aren't there more female players? Probably a combination of things certainly including cultural gender bias. Women can surely play the game but American culture doesn't seem to reward them for it.

In about 1990, my B-player rating would have put me in the top 50 women players in the country. A little later, the US got a lot of immigration from ex-Soviet Bloc countries. This included a very good number of strong female players. I can only surmise that their cultures were more supportive of the women.

My guess is that the composition of female players skews more heavily towards juniors than the composition of male players, but I didn't find any numbers on that. I say this because I saw more female players at scholastic tournaments as a child than I do now at open tournaments as an adult.

In 2018 this is certainly false. The statistics from the November 2018 FIDE rating list are that there are 668785 active players of whom 99325 are female. That is a female participation rate of about 15%.

The statistics from the May 2012 FIDE list (when you wrote this question) are that were 87538 active players of whom 7226 were female. That is a female participation rate of 8.25%. So even when you wrote this question your number was inaccurate.

The big difference between May 2012 and today in FIDE rating terms is that the current figures also include rapid and blitz and also FIDE's online Arena for online chess. FIDE rating of rapid and blitz only started with the July 2012 list and has grown massively since then. I believe the FIDE online Arena only started in late 2015.

One other factor also affects the figures and that is that the FIDE default when a new player is recorded is male. If the registering federation does not specify sex then the player is registered as male. This obviously introduces distortions in the figures. It should be noted that FIDE has made great efforts in more recent times to clean up its data and correct errors. More recent FIDE data is more accurate than older data.

Looking at the female participation rate (100 x active female players / active players for federations with 100 or more active players) gives these 10 federations as bottom of the list from the May 2012 list -

Here are the corresponding figures from the November 2018 list (restricted to federations with 1000 or more active players - about 10x as many active players so increase the "noise" filter by 10x).

First the bottom 10 -

Nobody says that and the statistics certainly don't say that either. What they do suggest is that men want to play chess much more than women. Where women have a greater choice of what sort of things they can do, as in the Scandinavian countries, it appears that many more of them have better things to do with their time than play chess ;-).

NB For anybody interested in the raw data, FIDE publish rating file data going back to 2001. For data before 2001 there is the Olimpbase site, but their data is very "dirty" and will need a lot of work to eliminate/merge duplicates and correct obviously false data before it can be used.

For real statistics, I guess scripting over a FIDE ratings database wouldn't be too hard, probably even mentioned in the introductory section of Women in Chess.

Most people (and other answers) cite a 5-15% figure.

Despite all feminist claims, it's not cultural, but biological. In countries where supposedly the culture is more supportive for equality in activities (like USSR), males are by far relatively predominant in chess, the same as in US. It's the same with careers. It hasn't made much of a difference now that engineering, for instance, has been a field accessible to women for a long time. Most of them simply prefer social activities more. As Desmond Morris says, the brains of men and women work differently from each other. This doesn't imply any inferiority, simply there are activities more suited for men and activities more suited for women. E.g. dyslexia is almost wholly an issue for men, not for women.

Other estimates range as high as a billion, an estimate seemingly based on word of mouth, and as moderately as FIDE's prior estimate of 200-300 million3. While no one can ever certainly identify the real number of players, it's clear that chess is one of the most popular games in the world today and in the past.

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