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World Champions Ranked by CAPS

Chess.com has recently developed a tool that evaluates the strength of play for any chess player, or the quality of moves of any chess game. They call it the Computer Aggregated Precision Score (or CAPS).

Essentially, what CAPS does is evaluate a player’s game (or set of games) and assess its moves for its accuracy against what the computers think are the best moves in each given position.

Now, since world champions of different eras have no way to prove their worth against each other, CAPS is a good way to evaluate and compare the quality of their games, and thus will give us a “rough estimate” of how well world champions will fare against each other should they face over the chessboard.

Indeed, Chess.com did just that.

Now, let’s find out how your favorite world champion fared using the CAPS system below:

CAPS World Champions

CAPS World Champions

What do you think? Do you agree with the CAPS system? Put your comments below.

November 2016 FIDE Ratings Update

In the past month, Ian Nepomniachtchi won the Tal Memorial and Pavel Eljanov won the Isle of Man. Thus, we see their ratings improve in the November 2016 FIDE Ratings List. Nepomniachtchi is now at No. 12 with ELO 2767 and Eljanov at No. 16 with ELO 2757.

Vladimir Kramnik slid down from No. 2 to No. 4 with ELO 2810 after his meager performance in the Tal Memorial.

Here are the Top 20 grandmasters for November 2016:

FIDE Ratings November 2016 Top 20

[csvtable file=”http://chesshive.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/fide-ratings-november-2016-top-20.csv”]
Check out the Top 100 list »

Baku 2016 Chess Olympiad Board Prizes Winners

[section_title title=”Board Prizes Winners – Open”]

At the conclusion of Baku 2016 Chess Olympiad, here are the Board Prizes winners for the Open Section. Board Prizes are awarded to top players in each board in terms of rating performance, not winning percentage nor game points.

Replay all the games of Baku 2016 Chess Olympiad (Open).

42nd Chess Olympiad Board Prizes Winners – Open

board-1-medalists-open

Board 1 Winners – Open

[csvtable file=”http://chesshive.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/board-1-open-winners.csv”]

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave wins Dortmund 2016 with One Round To Go

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (MVL) is slated to win the Dortmund’s Sparkassen Chess Meeting after 6 rounds and a round more to go. Chess.com writes:

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave continued to look nigh untouchable in round six of Dortmund’s Sparkassen Chess Meeting. Victory (against Ruslan Ponomariov) moved him to 5.0/6 and clinched first place with a round to go. Clinching first would be a remarkable achievement in any tournament, but it is especially impressive in a seven-round tournament like Dortmund.

This enabled MVL to chart his way up in second place in the current Live Ratings list:

live-ratings-july-17-2016

Standings after round 6 follows:

Vassily Ivanchuk is 7-time Capablanca Memorial champion

Chessbase reports:

The Capablanca Memorial is a tournament with a long tradition. The first of these events to honor the Cuban Champion was played in 1962, this year saw the 51st edition. Six of the previous 50 tournaments were won by Vassily Ivanchuk. This year he won for the seventh time. With four wins and six draws Ivanchuk scored 7.0/10 and was one point ahead of his closest rival.

Two things:

  1. Jose Raul Capablanca was that great chess player and champion that he deserved an annual chess tournament named after him — and long-running at that.
  2. Vassily Ivanchuk, having won the tournament 7 times, speaks volumes about his age. 😀

Photo credit: gettyimages