The Top Women Chess Players Over Time

If you've enjoyed our previous data visualizations of the most accurate chess players over time and the countries with the most grandmasters over time, then you'll want to check out our latest: The top women over time!

With the 2023 FIDE Women's World Championship ongoing, now is a good moment to take a walk through the history of the highest-rated women by FIDE since 1970. From GM Nona Gaprindashvili to GM Judit Polgar to GM Hou Yifan, watch below to see how the greatest women to ever play chess have compared for the last five-plus decades.

Jump to: Video | Methodology | Trends & Observations

Video

Methodology

The basis of the list is the active top 10 FIDE rating list, which has been published at least once a year since 1970. At the time, not every active player had a rating, and Gaprindashvili was the only woman with one. She became world champion in 1962 and was way ahead of other women playing chess at this time. Between 1971 and 1972, the number of women with a FIDE rating increased from three to 129.

After periods of biannual, quarterly, and bimonthly releases, the list finally moved to monthly in 2012. Until 2012, players remain on the graph until permanently falling below top-10 status. Any player in the top 10 at any point after 2012 remains on the chart through to the end, except in the cases of GM Judit Polgar and GM Viktorija Cmilyte, both of whom have retired or gone inactive.

To create an uninterrupted monthly chart in the video, data between lists was interpolated. The lists used are sourced to OlimpBase through 1999 and FIDE from 2000 onward.

Trends & Observations

There were many great women players before 1970 who do not appear in the video solely for the lack of a rating list. Vera Menchik was the most notable player in this group. She won all eight women's world championships she played, often in sizeable tournament fields. Menchik died in a bombing raid on London in 1944.

Gaprindashvili is the first player whose dominance was tracked statistically. Her strength as a player only made the Netflix controversy even more bizarre: the megahit series The Queen's Gambit included an unnecessary and incorrect line about Gaprindashvili, stating that she didn't play in events with men. Gaprindashvili sued Netflix and they settled for an undisclosed sum. 

Throughout the video, there is usually a clear #1 player, starting with Gaprindashvili. She was followed by GM Maia Chiburdanidze. The mid- to late-1980s and early 1990s buck this trend until Judit Polgar's dominance arises in the 1990s and 2000s. Since Polgar retired, Hou Yifan has been the top player.

The list of these number ones is quite exclusive, with only six players reaching the pinnacle. Judit Polgar was #1 for 25 years, just under half the period in review.

Every player in the video rises between July 1986 and January 1987, during which Chiburdanidze gains the top spot over GM Susan Polgar. That happened because FIDE awarded 100 extra rating points to every player besides Polgar, on the grounds that women's ratings were lower than they should have been due to playing in fields with each other, while Polgar was more regularly playing in open events with men. Polgar's exclusion from the gains was nonetheless questionable as she was not the only player with records against the men. Chiburdanidze herself, for instance, finished third out of 16 as the only woman playing the 1984 Rubinstein Memorial, played in similar events before and after that point.

In total, 80 women have ranked in the top 10 on at least one FIDE list. They all appear in the video.