Ageless Wonders

Chessbase had an interesting column yesterday about the ten highest-rated players of all time, in which they tracked down the exact games where they hit their rating peaks. It’s an interesting list, and I’ll give you the condensed version here (without the games).

Player	Peak Rating	Achieved Against	Year
1. Carlsen	2889	Nakamura	2014
2. Kasparov	2857	Anand	2000
3. Caruana	2851	Svidler	2014
4. Aronian	2836	Nakamura	2014
5. Topalov	2827	Nakamura	2015
6. Mamedyarov	2826	Navara	2018
7. So	2825	Onischuk	2017
8. Anand	2821	Shirov	2011
9. Vachier-Lagrave	2819	Svidler	2016
10. Nakamura	2819	Anand	2015

The first interesting thing about this list is that Hikaru Nakamura appears four times — three times as the victim! Chessbase speculates that this is because of his “fighting spirit.” That’s probably a nice way of saying, “unsound chess.” But also Viswanathan Anand was twice a victim, as well as Peter Svidler.

My wife asked me, what if you take age into account? When do world-class chess players hit their peaks? And who was the oldest when they reached their peak?

Here is the list of the only twelve players in history who have hit a peak rating of 2700 or above, and done it at age 40 or later. I’ll go from bottom to top, in countdown style, in case you want to make any guesses about who is at the top of the list.

Fine print: I worked out the ages in years and months, in order to break the ties. However, #3 and #4 are tied even when you go to months, and I did not want to bother figuring out the days. So I rather arbitrarily decided that former world champions should rank higher.

Player	Age at Peak
12. Evgeniy Najer	40
11. Veselin Topalov	40
10. Victor Bologan	40
9. Viswanathan Anand	41
8. Vladimir Kramnik	41
7. Michael Adams	41
6. Alexey Dreev	42
5. Mikhail Tal	43
4. Zurab Azmaiparashvili	43
3. Anatoly Karpov	43
2. Alexander Beliavsky	43
1. Boris Gelfand	45

One thing that jumps out at me is the number of world champions: Anand, Kramnik, Tal, Karpov, and arguably Topalov. This was far from obvious to me. None of them except for Anand was a particularly “old” world champion. Tal, especially, was famous for his wins when he was young, so I am stunned that he hit his rating peak at age 43.

Here’s another way to look at it: Tal hit his rating peak eighteen years after he lost the world championship. Karpov hit his peak nine years after he lost the world championship to Kasparov (although he was the quasi-world champion, also known as FIDE world champion, when he hit his rating peak in 1994). Vladimir Kramnik hit his rating peak nine years after he lost the world championship to Anand. And Topalov hit his peak eight years after he lost his quasi-world champion title to Kramnik. Of these five “ageless wonders,” only Anand hit his peak rating while he was undisputed world champion! That is absolutely mind-blowing to me.

The second interesting thing about this list is, of course, the true heroes — the journeymen whose names never appear on a list of greatest players. Bologan? Najer? Adams? Dreev? Azmaiparashvili? We have to salute them for their tireless dedication to improvement.

Finally, of course, we really have to salute the top two, who were both close to world-champion caliber but never quite made it. Beliavsky was world junior champion four years after Karpov, and I’m sure that some people believed he might follow Karpov as world champion. But in his only Candidates match he had the misfortune to go up against a young whippersnapper named Garry Kasparov, and well, you know the rest of that story. But he remained extremely active and reached his top rating fourteen years later.

The number one hero of old folks, Boris Gelfand, knocked on the door of a world championship for years before finally qualifying to play a match against Viswanathan Anand in 2012. You could argue that he came closer to winning than anyone since David Bronstein. Unlike the other ageless wonders on our list, he timed his rating peak to almost coincide with his world championship match; he hit his peak just a year later, in 2013.

Hope you enjoyed this somewhat different take on chess history. Next time, I’ll go back to my fifty years of chess saga, with the first of two installments for year 7 (1978).