This is nothing new, rumors of GM titles being earned by back-room negotiations for certain players to lose games to those seeking the GM title rather than over the board play have been around for many decades.
FIDE VP Nigel Short saying maybe the GM should be abolished is new.
A family spending $270,000 to get their kid the title is new.
The estimate of ten percent of all GMs cheating to become GMs is new.
This is a big story for the general public and should be at least as important to us.
the GM title just doesn’t seem to have the same cachet as it did “back in the day”. i was overawed by most of the guys back in the 70’s and 80’s and could probably name 80 percent of the GM title-holders. now i am hardly familiar with any of the them unless they’re in the “elite” status.
…scot…
It is a shame for the kid-His title will be forever tainted.
You’re assuming he keeps on playing, our history with young players chasing the title of National Master is that around half of them stop playing shortly after they achieve it. Burnout at the age of 12 is sad.
It is hard to make a good living playing chess, unless you’re also good at teaching it and/or writing about it, and those don’t exactly make you a millionaire. A few elite players do very well.
In my ideal world, which will never exist, GM titles should be restricted (in some fashion) to players who have a reasonable shot at playing for the world championship. Guess that what we now call “elite” grandmasters. 15 to 25 active top players at any time. Will never happen. “Weak GM” is an oxymoron.
I’m reminded of a Chess Life article on an ‘ordinary’ grandmaster, the late Art Bisguier.
Although he was never one of the top players in the world, Art understood chess in ways ordinary mortals never will, that’s why he was a grandmaster.
I’m not up on how titles are awarded anymore. I believe that there use to be a required minimum rating for IM and GM in addition to the necessary norms.
Let’s say, just for argument, 2400 for IM and 2500 for GM. Perhaps add 50 points to whatever the current minimums are.
Will never happen; everybody wants their very own ‘weak grand-master’.
GM. WGM, IM, WIM require norms (unless they are direct titles) and all titles have minimum ratings that need to have been met (200 lower for direct titles). There didn’t used to be a minimum for direct titles and thus you see direct titles for sub-1700 players.
Title MinRtgNorms MinRtgDirect
GM 2500 2300
IM 2400 2200
WGM 2300 2100
WIM 2200 2000
FM 2300 2100
CM 2200 2000
WFM 2100 1900
WCM 2000 1800
Yes, earning a GM title requires a 2500 rating plus having the requisite event norms.
There are 976 players with a FIDE rating of 2500 or more on the August 2021 FRL. (368,771 players listed)
892 of them have a GM title, 73 have an IM title, 5 have a FM title, and 6 have no title.
There also appear to be 840 GMs who no longer have a FIDE rating of 2500 or greater.
I don’t know how many of those players are still active.
892+ GM titles. The case is rested.
The 840 without a 2500+ rating may make an even better case. While some of them may have had natural rating drops due to age, how many of them blipped over 2500 briefly but never really sustained that sort of rating?
I’m sure there are GM’s on the list who haven’t played in a tournament recently, possibly not in decades.
The number of still-living lifetime .300 hitters in baseball is far greater than the number of active .300 hitters, but that doesn’t diminish the accomplishment.
I remember something Arnie Denker told me at a US Open once, after losing to an up-and-coming young player. He said that quite a few of the younger players, not yet grandmasters or even IMs, were far better than he ever was. He wondered if he’d have been able to earn GM norms against them at his playing peak. Chess is getting better, especially at the high levels. This was something one of the honorees at the US Chess awards banquet noted, these days it is next to impossible for a young talent to reach world-class level without a significant support team, unlike it was 50 or 100 years ago.
Another interesting way of looking at the FIDE GM list, by decade of birth:
[code]decade count
1920 1
1930 20
1940 57
1950 140
1960 304
1970 367
1980 450
1990 333
2000 60[/code]
BTW, the player from the 1920’s is GM Yuri Averbakh, 99, who became a GM in 1952 and whose peak FIDE rating was in 1971. His peak rating was 2550, does that mean he was a ‘weak GM’? I suspect anyone who has read his books would disagree.
2550 in 1971 was a lot more impressive then than that rating would be today. In 1971 Averbakh’s rating was tied with Larry Evans, Lubomir Kavalek, Ratmir Kholmov, Sammy Reshevsky, and Lothar Schmid for 35th place on the January FIDE list. Today 35th on the 2700chess.com list is Yu Yangyi (2703.6). I doubt anyone would say today that a player rated 2700+ was a weak GM.