For the first time ever: no Russian in the top ten!

by Frederic Friedel
8/6/2025 – It was the ever observant Leonard Barden who pointed it out to me: for the first time since FIDE began publishing its rating lists, 1971, there are no Russians in the top ten. The Guardian's weekly chess columnist turns 96 this month, and still keeps providing us with interesting reports.
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"It would have been inconceivable in the glory days of the Soviet chess empire," Leonard Barden wrote in his July 4th column. No Russians ranked in the classical world top 10. When FIDE started publishing its ratings – then annually and now monthly – Bobby Fischer was No 1 in the very first list, calculated on the eve of his Reykjavik match with Boris Spassky.

After Fischer gave up active play, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov took over. But Russians slowly started dropping out of the top ten. The final nail in the coffin came in June when Ian Nepomniachtchi a former world title challenger, dropped from 10th to 14th after a poor performance at Tashkent. "In the 1970s," Barden writes, "it would have been a joke to suggest that Russian supremacy would disappear within half a century and be replaced by a rivalry between India and the United States."

While Nepo dropped out of the top ten, the 19-year-old super-grandmaster, Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu, won the UzChess Cup in Tashkent, his third major victory of 2025. “Pragg” is now the world No 4, having edged ahead of his Asian rivals, world champion Gukesh Dommaraju and fellow Indian Arjun Erigaisi. He is behind a Norwegian, world No 1 Magnus Carlsen, and the two Americans Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana.

The top Indian players: Praggnanandhaa, Erigaisi, Gukesh and Aravindh (photos FIDE) as young super-talents, and as top players today. Aravindh was in the top ten briefly. 

I showed Leonard the record of my predictions, which I wrote about in this article in April 2025: And then there were four? He replied: "I expect that the next superstar, better than all four Indians, will be a Turk: Erdogmus even looks better than Fischer in 1957-8, though the ultimate test will be whether he can qualify for the 2026 candidates, via the World Cup or Grand Swiss."

Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş (photo FIDE) is a Turkish chess prodigy, widely recognized as one of the most promising young chess players in the world. Born on June 3, 2011, in Bursa, Turkey, he began learning chess at age six and quickly showed exceptional talent. By 2024, he became the fourth-youngest grandmaster in history, and soon after that achieved the milestone of becoming the youngest player ever to reach a FIDE rating of 2600 – surpassing records previously held by Judit Polgár.

As of August 2025, Erdoğmuş has entered the world's chess top 100 at just 14 years old, breaking several age-related records along the way. Supported by strong sponsorship and coaching by top grandmasters, his rise signals a new era for Turkish and international chess.

So here is a list of the top 40 in the world in the August 2025 FIDE list, with ratings and birth year. The two (!) Russian players are marked in red, the eight US players in blue and the eight Indians in green. You can count the numbers from other nations. Click to enlarge.

We are eager to see when Erdogmus and other super-talents will join them. 

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Editor-in-Chief emeritus of the ChessBase News page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.