January FIDE Ratings: 43-Point Lead For Carlsen, Giri 3rd, 3 Chinese In Top 20

Magnus Carlsen starts the new year with a 43-point rating lead over Vladimir Kramnik. For the first time in his career Anish Giri reached third place in the January FIDE ratings.

With the London Chess Classic and the Qatar Masters just behind us, it's a good moment to talk ratings again.

Six disappointing months ended in November for Magnus Carlsen, and he is now fully back. He won the London Chess Classic, with it the Grand Chess Tour, and he also clinched first prize in Qatar. He won exactly 10 rating points to reach 2844.

That is still 18 point lower than Carlsen's rating a year ago (his top rating was 2882 in May 2014). The Norwegian's lead over the #2 is one Elo point bigger than twelve months ago.

Blitz tiebreaks were rated at #Qatar_Masters so that Carlsen is now World #1 in all sections: classic, rapid and blitz.

— Live Chess Ratings (@2700chess) December 31, 2015

Vladimir Kramnik, #2 in the list, actually won the same number of points as Carlsen lost in 2015: 18. The 14th World Champion was less active though: He played 46 rated games compared to 72 for Carlsen.

Kramnik won 5.1 rating points in Qatar and crossed the 2800 mark again. For a couple of rounds Anish Giri was almost number two, but his draws with Ponomariov and Akopian in the final rounds dropped him back.

But Giri did very well, winning 14.3 points in London and Qatar to reach world #3 for the first time. He is one spot away from the Dutch record: In the early 1980s Jan Timman was briefly #2 behind Anatoly Karpov. In 2014 Giri won 50 Elo points; in 2015 he added 14 more.

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave also reached his career high. The French GM is now world #7 after reaching the playoffs in London. He didn't qualify for the 2016 Grand Chess Tour, but there's a decent chance that he'll be invited anyway.

Viswanathan Anand and Veselin Topalov ended at the bottom of the leaderboard in London and this means -11.6 for Anand and -22.6 for Topalov. The latter dropped from #2 to #9. Ding Liren dropped out of the top 10 again after losing 10 points in 6 games in China.

Like last year Yu Yangyi did very well in Qatar, and now the Chinese #2 has entered the world's top 20. It's the first time ever that Chinese players have held three of the top twenty spots. 

Correction: that happened before, in the July 2015 rating list.

Speaking of China, its biggest talent didn't do well this month. In fact, Wei Yi lost 23.9 points in 19 games played in China and Qatar, and he dropped from 27th to 37th in the world.

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Hou Yifan also played in Qatar, where she lost 9.6 points. She's still comfortably the world #1 female player (with Judit Polgar being inactive), and her lead over Humpy Koneru is 90 points. 

Alexandra Kosteniuk won 7.5 points in Qatar and is only 5 points away from world #3, Women's World Champion Mariya Muzychuk. Nana Dzagnidze had a very bad month: She lost 24.3 points and went from world #3 to #7.

All data courtesy of FIDE.

Chess.com Blitz and Bullet

In Blitz ratings on our site GM Hikaru (Hikaru Nakamura) has broken the 2900 barrier. His lead over GM LyonBeast (Maxime Vachier-Lagrave), his opponent in the recent Death Match, is now a whopping 122 points.

The highest rated non-GM is IM QuestToGM (Akshat Chandra), in an impressive 8th place.

Nakamura's superiority in bullet is legendary. At the moment he is rated 3150, no less than 245 points ahead of runner-up IM wonderfultime (Minh Le), who is a serious bullet specialist as well.