Flying upward

So breaches 2600
Monday, October 13, 2008 MANILA, PHILIPPINES

GM Wesley So is still the Philippines’ top player and continued his upward ratings climb by gaining 79 (!) points from 2531 to 2610. Now we can legitimately call Wesley a super-grandmaster. He is, together with IM Joseph Sanchez (Italy-based), our most active player (69 games in the last three months). If he continues with the current flow, then theoretically Wesley would crash the 2700 club by next year.

I should clarify to BW readers, though, that as the rating goes up then increasing your points gets harder and harder, since the theory of the ELO rating is to measure actual vs. expected performance. For example, a player rated 2600 who plays in a tournament with an average rating of 2600 and scores 4.5/9 gets zero additional points since that is his expected score. However, a 2500 player playing in the same tournament with the same 4.5/9 score gets 12 additional points.

When the Battle of Grandmasters (where Wesley So gained 15 points) was not reported to FIDE on time for the July rating list some of our friends wrote me that our Federation’s incompetence has deprived him of his just desserts. My reply then was that it was a double-edged sword — on the other hand that means that our prodigy’s rating base for the 3rd quarter 2008 would be 2577 instead of 2592, and that would make it just a little bit easier to gain rating points in the busy tournament schedule from July to September. Point in fact is that when everything was summed up in the October rating list Wesley So actually gained a few points from the delay in reporting. Could it be that our Federation is not so incompetent? Heh heh, what do you think?

Now that he is 2600+ the way for GM So to progress to the next step would be (theoretically only — of course in the national interest this rule cannot be imposed strictly) to stop playing in tournaments with average ratings lower than his. I remember GM Roman Dzindzichashvili, who was rated among the top 20 players of the world when he left the Soviet Union for the United States in the 1980s.

After a year his rating had gone down considerably and a journalist asked for the reason behind the slump. Roman was very surprised “what slump? I’ve won every single tournament I’ve played in. It is just that the average rating of American tournaments is a lot lower than that of the USSR.”

Anyway, I hear that Wesley So has been receiving invitations to play in the strong international tournaments — this January he will be participating in the “C” tournament of Wijk aan Zee and in November also that he has been invited to the SPICE (Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence) International Tournament to be held around November 2009 at the Texas Tech University, Texas, USA. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Wesley will continue to do so proud!

Here is the full article.