Where would an Elo rating of exactly 2600 place you in the chess world rankings?

- 5 years ago: In the top 300
- 15 years ago: In the top 200
- 25 years ago: In the top 100
- 35 years ago: In the top 30
- 45 years ago: In the top 15

José Raúl Capablanca, pictured, according to the archive (audiovis.nac.gov.pl) entry, in Berlin in August 1928. #chess

A souvenir from the 1985 World Junior (U-20) Championship, which was held in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.
Dlugy won; among the other players - Anand, Ivanchuk, Kožul, Blatný, Kuczyński, Cs. Horváth, Borges Mateos...

Budapest, 1957. The players are unknown, but the figure in the centre is the footballer Antal Kotász (1929-2003), who played at left back for the local club Honvéd and the Hungarian national team, winning 34 caps between 1954 and 1961.
(📷via fortepan.hu.) #chess

Szabó was already a leading Hungarian player before World War II, but was lucky to survive the conflict on the Eastern Front. This from his book 'My Best Games of Chess' (Pergamon, 1986). 7 stone is ~44.5kg. #chess

World Champion Anatoly Karpov, pictured in play at the IBM tournament in Amsterdam on 17th May 1981. This event, which featured previous winners, was the last in the series. It was won by Jan Timman.
(📷:M. Antonisse / ANEFO, via nationaalarchief.nl.) #chess

40 years ago today: chessscotland.com/documents/hist…
Aged 10, in November 1977, I had seen Karpov on 'The Master Game' (BBC TV) & was inspired to study chess seriously; in March 1979 I played my first tournament; 5 years and 2 months later I was shaking hands with the World Champion. 🙏

Interesting fact re. Karpov: despite being an ever-present in Soviet Olympiad teams from 1972 onwards (unless busy in World Championship matches, as in 1978, 1984 & 1990), post the 1991 break-up of the USSR, he did not represent Russia in any.

NEW BLOG POST: Featuring some of Anatoly Karpov's games played during the final years of the USSR, with translations of the 12th World Champion's annotations from the contemporary Soviet chess press:
dgriffinchess.wordpress.com/2024/05/12/ana… #chess

The latest in Levitov Chess's epic series with Garry Kasparov. In Russian, with English subtitles available. Simply unmissable. #chess
youtube.com/watch?v=kF0V4U…