Top tens in the Chessmetrics list

by Jeff Sonas
4/27/2026 – "I was intrigued to see the list of the youngest players to reach the top ten," said chess statistician Jeff Sonas. "As the article states, my monthly Chessmetrics historical ratings are indeed unofficial, but being able to look further back, more than a century before FIDE Elo ratings started, certainly does help to place the modern FIDE-rated players into a historical context for comparisons like this." Here is Jeff's historical data.
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Chessmetrics and a history of the top ten

By Jeff Sonas

This recent story told how the Turkish phenom Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş broke into 2700+ Elo slot at the age of 14, and how he was now clearly on a path to becoming the youngest ever player to reach the world's top ten. 

Very few people know that I am working on bringing my Chessmetrics ratings up to the present day, although I don't mind it becoming public knowledge now. I have decided to completely redo my collection of tournament and match results across the years, with much more verification of the data than I did 20-25 years ago when I first started collecting event results for Chessmetrics. So the underlying data will ultimately be more accurate, and of course I have also learned an additional thing or two about chess ratings in the last 20-25 years, so I expect the algorithm to be better as well. Sadly this review process is very time-consuming.

So far I have assembled clean event data for 1834-1920 and only partial data since 1920. I still have many decades of event results to work through before I can finalize things and go live with Chessmetrics version 2!  The Mega Database from Chessbase has been absolutely invaluable in these efforts, along with some great websites I didn't have access to a quarter-century ago.

Nevertheless I can still look at my latest try (as of this evening!) and see what my newest list would be, of the youngest players to reach the top ten. It appears that there have been 30 different players in chess history who reached the top ten before their 21st birthday, based on these extremely unofficial Chessmetrics ratings, which of course will differ from FIDE Elo ratings because the algorithms are different, the games used are different, and the FIDE ratings weren't always calculated on a monthly basis.

Here is that list of 30 players:

Chessmetrix top-ten players
Player Born Top Ten Achieved in
01. Garry Kasparov 04.1963 16yr+0mo May 1979
02. Bobby Fischer 04.1943 16yr+3mo July 1959
03. Alexander Alekhine 10.1892 16yr+5mo April 1909
04. Vladimir Kramnik 06.1975 17yr+2mo Sept 1992
05. Magnus Carlsen 11.1990 17yr+6mo June 2008
06. Gukesh Dommaraju 05.2006 18yr+4mo Oct. 2024
07. Alireza Firouzja 06.2003 18yr+5mo Dec. 2021
07. Ruslan Ponomariov 10.1983 18yr+5mo April 2002
09. Alexei Shirov 07.1972 19yr+0mo Aug. 1991
10. Teimour Radjabov 03.1987 19yr+3mo July 2006
11. Praggnanandhaa R 08.2005 19yr+5mo Feb. 2025
12. Gata Kamsky 06.1974 19yr+6mo Jan. 1994
12. Peter Leko 09.1979 19yr+6mo April 1999
14. Joseph Blackburne 12.1841 19yr+9mo Oct.1861
14. Nodirbek Abdusattorov 09.2004 19yr+9mo July 2024
16. Saviely Tartakower 02.1887 19yr+10mo Jan. 1907
16. Reuben Fine 10.1914 19yr+10mo Sept. 1934
18. Artur Jussupow 02.1960 19yr+11mo Feb 1980
19. Vasyl Ivanchuk 03.1969 20yr+0mo April 1989
20. Veselin Topalov 03.1975 20yr+0mo April 1995
21. Mikhail Tal 11.1936 20yr+3mo Mar. 1957
22. Paul Keres 01.1916 20yr+4mo June 1936
23. Anatoly Karpov 05.1951 20yr+7mo Jan. 1972
23. Jose Capablanca 11.1888 20yr+7mo July 1909
23. Cecil de Vere 02.1846 20yr+7mo Oct. 1866
23. Wang Hao 08.1989 20yr+7mo April 2010
27. Sergey Karjakin 01.1990 20yr+9mo Nov. 2010
28. Fabiano Caruana 07.1992 20yr+10mo Jun. 2013
28. Sergei Tiviakov 02.1973 20yr+10mo Jan. 1994
30. Arjun Erigaisi 09.2003 20yr+11mo Sept. 2024

And a few other all-time greats:

34. Emanuel Lasker 12.1868 21y+1mo Feb. 1890
36. Paul Morphy 06.1837 21y+2mo Sept. 1857
49. Viswanathan Anand 12.1969 21y+10mo Nov. 1991
56. Mikhail Botvinnik 08.1911 22y+9mo June 1934

Also note that Javokhir Sindarov will presumably join this list once I bring the tournament data all the way up to the present, as he will not reach his 21st birthday until December, and almost certainly would already be in the Chessmetrics top ten right now.  However, I am currently focusing on tournament data from the 1920's rather than the 2020's! 

Stay tuned for further developments, and feel free to email me at jeff@chessmetrics.com if you have questions or comments. 

<< The life of Mian Sultan Khan
Jeff Sonas is a statistical chess analyst who invented the Chessmetrics system for rating chess players, which is intended as an improvement on the Elo rating system. He is the founder and proprietor of the Chessmetrics.com website, which gives Sonas' calculations of the ratings of current players and historical ratings going back as far as January 1843. Sonas graduated with honors with a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University in 1991.
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aquilotto1968 aquilotto1968 16 minutes ago
Wow, what a great news! I hope Chessmetrics 2.0 will be online as soon as possible!
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