This week we launch the About Chess register of Famous Chess Players (see the link box in the upper right corner).
We hope to do an article on each and every one of these chess greats, which should keep us busy for a long time to come!
The 112 names on the register were not chosen at random.
In case you're wondering why such-and-such a name does or doesn't appear, this article explains how the register was developed.
First, we collected lists of great chess players from a number of other sources.
Then we used an arbitrary cutoff on each list to determine the top players, we combined the lists into a single database, and we standardized the names across all lists.
Finally, we selected the players who appeared on more than one of our original lists.
All of our original lists were based on rating, so it's natural that our first source was The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present (Batsford 1978) by Arpad Elo, the creator of the modern rating.
Two appendices to Elo's book were an 'All-Time List of FIDE Titleholders' with 590 names (see the link box for more about FIDE) and an 'All-Time List of Great Untitled Players' with 197 names.
Both lists were the result of Elo's calculations into the relative strength of the top players and included results through the end of 1977.
Our second source was a spreadsheet that we downloaded some time ago and which contains partial FIDE rating lists from the 1980s and 1990s.
The rating lists, which have 234 different players, are not complete and someday we hope to replace these with more complete versions of those years.
For now that is the best data we have covering the end of the 20th century.
Our third source combined FIDE top-100 rating lists published in The Week in Chess (link box again).
The January lists from 1995 through 2003 yielded 942 entries with 219 different players.
Next we added a list from Chessmetrics by Jeff Sonas (link box again).
The home page links to other Chessmetrics pages for 'everyone who has ever been a top-five player', as calculated by Sonas, and has exactly 100 names.
Finally, we used the official list of FIDE Grandmasters (GM) from the end of 2000.
This covered 712 players.
These lists combined gave us the names of about 2000 players.
We reduced that number by using a cutoff.
We cut Elo's lists at a 2500 rating, the FIDE 1980-1999 & GM lists at 2650, and the FIDE 1995-2003 list at the top-25 on each list; Sonas's list was left uncut.
The combined short lists gave us 380 entries for 215 different players.
Finally, we selected any player whose name appeared more than once.
This gave us 111 names.
If you're paying attention to the numbers, you noticed that the published list has 112 names.
Where did the extra name come from?
When we examined the list of 111 names, Ruslan Ponomariov's name was missing.
Since he's the current FIDE World Champion, we couldn't leave him off.
We added an override list to our database to give him the required second nomination.
We admit that the method to produce the list is not completely fair.
Players who reached their peak between 1978 and 1993 are underweighted, while players who were active after 1993 are overweighted.
There are some names missing who should be there : Robert Huebner and Lev Polugaevsky are two glaring examples; and there are a few names that might leave you scratching your head : Vladimir Makogonov and Gustav Neumann would not be on our personal A-list.
One final note : the register includes only over-the-board (OTB) players.
Correspondence players, composers, writers, teachers, organizers, politicians, and other personalities who have had a profound impact on chess are not yet included.
Some day we hope to add these names as well as more of the many great players who are missing completely.
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