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Magnus Carlsen has record rating but is not as dominant as Bobby Fischer
Leonard Barden
Friday 20 February 2015 17.32 EST
Bobby Fischer never achieved 2800, the super-elite rating for the very strongest grandmasters. At his 1972 peak during his match with Boris Spassky at Reykjavik Fischer reached 2785, which reflected his record run of 20 consecutive games won and put him 120 points ahead of Spassky.
Garry Kasparov did pass 2800 and set a record of 2851 but now 2800 is no longer an Everest to conquer. This week the magic figure has been passed twice. Anish Giri did it when the Dutch 20-year-old won his opening round at the Tbilisi Grand Prix, then Hikaru Nakamura hit 2800 at Zurich, the first American to do so.
Giri and Nakamura are only the ninth and 10th to reach the target and the standout figure now is that Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, on 2863, is 50 points clear – not quite Fischer dominance but on the way.
The obvious question is: are all the 10 2800s really superior to the legendary Fischer or is rating inflation a significant part of the answer? Probably they are truly better, though inflation may well exaggerate the margin. Today’s GMs have a huge advantage in that they have easy access to all the games of their predecessors and can prepare for any opponent at the flick of a computer button rather than ploughing through masses of printed material as Fischer’s generation had to. And computers have hugely expanded opening theory so that key lines are analysed to move 20 or 25 or even beyond.
But there is a downside, which also emerged this week. Computer material has to be committed to memory and nowadays there are more elite tournaments where only top stars compete and there are few bunnies. So the dangers are information overload and burnout and that is what happened to Nakamura’s opponent Sergey Karjakin. The Russian, 25, who at 12 was the youngest ever GM, failed to remember the computer analysis when the game reached a wild position where an unlikely sequence would draw by perpetual check.
Two other current burn-out victims are the world No3, Fabiano Caruana, who plays with hardly a break and whose form is now pedestrian compared with St Louis 2014, and Levon Aronian, who used to be No2 but is now in danger of dropping out of the top 10.
Full article here.