England's world rank

[Roger de Coverly]

The Fide rating site gives a world ranking based on the ratings of the top 10 active players.
http://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml

England have recently jumped from 19th to 15th. This isn't a dramatic breakthrough after years of decline though, it's based on just one game by Matthew Sadler.
http://ratings.fide.com/individual_calc ... 2010-11-01

There's Julian and the Doctor as well to boost ENG's standings if they were tempted back.
http://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml?to ... ountry=ENG

[Leonard Barden]

Not much of a jump anyway when places 16-19 are so closely grouped.

The signiicant position which stands out from the list, and one which poses fundamental questions to English chess, is France in fourth place.

England has just two players (David Howell and Yang-Fan Zhou) born 1990 or later ranked in the top 100; France has eight, three of them ranked in the national top six.

[Joey Stewart]

Yeah but every tournament france has are fide rated - they hardly have to try to get their ratings up. Playing here our juniors have to claw and fight for every rating point from a crop of very tenacious and, in my opinion, under rated players. It is no wonder it takes such a long time to see the best English players reach their full potential when they are being slowed down to such an extent.

[Leonard Barden]

Yeah but every tournament france has are fide rated - they hardly have to try to get their ratings up. Playing here our juniors have to claw and fight for every rating point from a crop of very tenacious and, in my opinion, under rated players. It is no wonder it takes such a long time to see the best English players reach their full potential when they are being slowed down to such an extent.

If that statistically dubious claim was correct, you would expect to see English players outperform and visitors underperform their Fide ratings in such events as the London Classic Open and the Hastings Masters, and that doesn't happen.

[Joey Stewart]

What about the world junior championships? If I remember rightly all of our players performed higher then their expected ratings - I thought that you were making the point that we do not have any talented youngsters anymore and I think that we do but it is going to take them alot longer to get those higher ratings they deserve.

[Ola Winfridsson]

What about the world junior championships? If I remember rightly all of our players performed higher then their expected ratings - I thought that you were making the point that we do not have any talented youngsters anymore and I think that we do but it is going to take them alot longer to get those higher ratings they deserve.

I think you'll find that that varies from one youth championship to another. Also, youth championhips are notoriously unreliable as gauges (since junior results tend to swing wildly).

The really interesting thing about France's 4th place though is that, in contrast to the USA and Israel, there seems to be a lot more homewgrown talent, in the top 10 and in general.

[Joey Stewart]

Yeah, it is strange really - I have only ever met one chess playing frenchman in my life and, yet, they are one of the top nations in the world.
You occasionally see them in the 4ncl and really big tournaments, but otherwise not so much apart from their very top grand masters who make the news from time to time.

[Alex Holowczak]

Yeah, it is strange really - I have only ever met one chess playing frenchman in my life

Well, if you'd only ever met one Frenchman, that'd be quite a good percentage.

[Jonathan Bryant]

I have only ever met one chess playing frenchman in my life ....

It wasn't Michel Fourniet was it?

http://streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.c ... chess.html


Perhaps if somebody went out and murdered a few folk (preferably with a sharpened bishop) chess would get a bit more publicity here too and we'd have juniors flocking back to the game?!


On a slightly more serious note, should we really be worried that we're so much behind France? After all, we were loads ahead of them in the 80s.

It *could* be that there's some structural reason that we can fix that results in us being a distant second to them just now. It *could* have been some structural reason that meant that France didn't benefit from the Fischer boom like England did.

Or maybe these things just happen and are beyond our control?


I wonder what would be considered par for our - England's I mean - world level?

[Paul Sanders]

Yeah, it is strange really - I have only ever met one chess playing frenchman in my life and, yet, they are one of the top nations in the world.

I have observed quite a few chess playing French people in France. Perhaps they don't have much of an incentive to come and meet you in England...

[Richard James]

Number of English players born in 1993 with a current FIDE rating: 18

Number of French players born in 1993 with a current FIDE rating: 201

Go figure.

Our problem is not so much strength as depth, and not so much that we're not doing enough but that we've been doing it the wrong way. There was a tremendous decline in standards at primary school level between the mid 1990s and the mid 2000s. I could see from what I was doing in primary schools through the Richmond Chess Initiative what was going wrong and why it was going wrong.

There are signs, though, that things are getting better. Chess in Schools and Communities is going about chess in exactly the right way, encouraging schools to teach chess as a way of developing thinking skills while setting up community clubs where children who are interested in taking the game further can get professional tuition.

The CoM is also a welcome and valuable development which will help schools and pupils focus on skill development rather than just competitive play.

[Roger de Coverly]

Number of English players born in 1993 with a current FIDE rating: 18

Number of French players born in 1993 with a current FIDE rating: 201

There's a distortion that almost all French events are played at time controls which enable them to be FIDE rated. If you play in a French tournament even at Minor level, there are enough rated players around to get a part rating.

Looking at the top 10 players

ENG

1 Adams, Michael g ENG 2723 18 1971
2 Short, Nigel D g ENG 2680 13 1965
3 McShane, Luke J g ENG 2645 16 1984
4 Sadler, Matthew D g ENG 2618 1 1974
5 Howell, David W L g ENG 2611 8 1990
6 Jones, Gawain C B g ENG 2575 13 1987
7 Pert, Nicholas g ENG 2570 11 1981
8 Hebden, Mark L g ENG 2560 13 1958
9 Haslinger, Stewart G g ENG 2543 0 1981
10 Parker, Jonathan F g ENG 2531 0 1976

FRA

1 Bacrot, Etienne g FRA 2715 6 1983
2 Fressinet, Laurent g FRA 2709 15 1981
3 Vachier-Lagrave, Maxime g FRA 2703 29 1990
4 Feller, Sebastien g FRA 2657 9 1991
5 Gharamian, Tigran g FRA 2650 1 1984
6 Edouard, Romain g FRA 2636 9 1990
6 Tkachiev, Vladislav g FRA 2636 9 1973
8 Bauer, Christian g FRA 2619 10 1977
9 Sokolov, Andrei g FRA 2593 4 1963
10 Hamdouchi, Hicham g FRA 2591 11 1972

France has at least three imports from countries of the former USSR (Gharamian, Tkachiev, Sokolov). More to the point about their recent success is that they have three players born in 1990 or later with ratings above 2600. Their early 1980's born players (Bacrot, Fressinet) out-rate ENGs (Pert, Haslinger) as well.

[Joey Stewart]

Number of English players born in 1993 with a current FIDE rating: 18

Number of French players born in 1993 with a current FIDE rating: 201

Go figure.

Our problem is not so much strength as depth, and not so much that we're not doing enough but that we've been doing it the wrong way. There was a tremendous decline in standards at primary school level between the mid 1990s and the mid 2000s. I could see from what I was doing in primary schools through the Richmond Chess Initiative what was going wrong and why it was going wrong.

There are signs, though, that things are getting better. Chess in Schools and Communities is going about chess in exactly the right way, encouraging schools to teach chess as a way of developing thinking skills while setting up community clubs where children who are interested in taking the game further can get professional tuition.

The CoM is also a welcome and valuable development which will help schools and pupils focus on skill development rather than just competitive play.

It may well be down to the fact that they have dumped so much additional red tape upon teachers since those days (and continue to do so) that many potential school clubs do not have somebody with enough time to run them and not enough financial resources to hire in a coach.