| Famous Chess Players : The Lost Generation | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Our initial list missed many strong players active in the 1970s and 1980s. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
When we first started working on our list of Famous Chess Players (see the link in the upper right corner of this article) we realized that it was incomplete.
The sources that we used to identify candidates for the list had a big hole which missed players active in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nearly a year after publishing the list on About Chess, we're finally ready to correct our omission.
We've added to our selection criteria the FIDE rating lists covering the 30-year period from 1975 to 2004 (see the link box again) and have taken into account the Top-25 players in the world for each rating period.
Any player who ranked in the Top-25 three times is now on our list.
Any player who ranked in the Top-25 at least once and who meets one of other criteria, like former candidate for the World Championship, is also on our list.
The 30 players who met these criteria are listed in the following table.
They include well known players like Walter Browne, Lubomir Kavalek, and Jonathan Speelman.
Just as we expected to find, many of these players were active in the 1970s and 1980s. Of the 30 names, 25 were born between 1940 and 1963. Not too surprisingly, close to half are from ex-USSR countries, while England, Hungary, and the United States are also well represented. Now that we are comfortable with the scope of our list, which has 215 players, we hope to identify personalities who have been important to chess for reasons other than play -- writers, organizers, and composers come to mind --- and to add capsule biographies for all names on the list. Watch this space for future articles on Famous Chess Players! |
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