After a steep increase in players’ early years (youth is wasted on the young), the estimated trend in ratings peaks just after age 38, before beginning a long, slow, irreversible and depressing decline (kinda like real life).īut when the ratings are plotted this way, Kasparov’s outlier status becomes clear - his most recent rating, established before he retired in 2005, is 2812. The result is shaped like a large floating apostrophe of mortality. (To estimate a given player’s age, we subtracted his or her birth year from 2017.)

These are all the players currently rated by FIDE, although some of them, such as Kasparov, are flagged as “inactive,” meaning that they haven’t played a rated game in a year or more. 1 The end result was a data set with more than 280,000 players and their respective ratings. This lists ranks all the players registered with the game’s international governing body according to their Elo rating. To get some insight into how chess skill might decline with age, I downloaded the most recent FIDE rating list, from the beginning of August. But the open question was how well he could perform against the young guns across the table. The chess world was abuzz with news of the return Kasparov hasn’t played competitively since 2005. Four of the 10 competitors are in the world’s top 10.

He has suited up for this week’s Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz, a 10-player round-robin tournament that consists of relatively speedy games and features some scarily strong competition. Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion and probably the best player ever to play the game, has come out of retirement and returned to competitive chess.

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