ChessBase has a nice wrap-up of the year's new rating lists, separated by gender, age and time control. Their report also notes the somewhat bizarre case of 14-year-old Azeri Parviz Gasimov, whose rating has skyrocketed from 1949 on the October list to - get ready for this - 2517! Incredible. The bizarre aspect is that while he play and performances have been remarkable, he has yet to have a TPR over 2400! Helpfully, Chess24 offers a detailed explanation of how it happened.
There won't be a world championship this year (in the unqualified sense, that is; there will be a women's world championship, rapid & blitz world championships, junior world championships and so on), so let's do a little speculating about what the top of the rating lists will look like in January of 2016. Right now the top five looks like this:
- 1. Magnus Carlsen 2862
- 2. Fabiano Caruana 2820
- 3. Alexander Grischuk 2810
- 4. Veselin Topalov 2800
- 5-6. Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian 2797
What do you think the top five will look like in a year? I won't try to guess the specific ratings, but my prediction for the top five is this:
- 1. Magnus Carlsen
- 2. Fabiano Caruana
- 3. Levon Aronian
- 4. Alexander Grischuk
- 5. Anish Giri
I'm also going to guess that Hou Yifan will pass Judit Polgar on the rating list at some point this year (at the moment, she only needs two points to do so) and bring her rating within ten points of 2700.