That missing Elo ratings from the past are tough challenge for any chess historian is no surprise to anybody. The official FIDE site only provides ratings from 2000 onwards and benoni.de site allowes to check ratings back to 1990. Unfortunately due to fact it operates on FIDE IDs it does not handle player federation transfers well. It does not provide historical info on deceased players either.

This should no longer be the issue since with the support of many people of good will OlimpBase men finally compiled complete Elo rating list 1971-2000. Based on official, registered data solely, so no rubbish. Ratings prior to 1975 were taken from Chessmile site (not available anymore) while the rest were provided by indispensable Mark Weeks as appeared in past Informant volumes. See Mark's blog for more details.

Things are not so simple though. Over decades nobody took care of preserving rating history. To compile the reliable and standarized list is still a challenge. The provided list does not deal with the problem of unproper spelling of some of players' names or even some rating calculation errors which were common in pre-computer era. It is because the rating lists originate from different sources. Some lists used only acronyms of first names, and some did not. Spelling is sometimes inconsistant over years too (very frequent as far as Arab or ex-Soviet players are concerned). It isn't so bad e.g. with Krasenkov, M following Krasenkov, Mikhail, but what about Tseshkovsky and Cheshkovsky? Not to mention that some more complicated names seem to appear in more than two variations (check e.g. Arne Vinje-Gulbrandsen).

For practical purposes our table should be fine, but for sake of purity, and probably future incorporation on to FIDE official database, we should do our best to make the database top quality. So far only names starting with letter "A" have been standarized. The rest of alphabet still waits for its turn.

We are looking for wit volunteers who would contribute a few days on providing the most complete and standarized Elo table database to World's chess community. Please contact us for details.

Most of corrections needed to be input are fairly simple, like merging Vilela, J L and Vilela, Jose Luis into one record. More difficult ones may be discussed separately one by one.

Download Elo tables 1971-2000 file (8,9 MB, includes auxillary file useful for volunteers only)

by Jovan @ 25 Mar 2008 06:20 am

Fantastic! This is the chess project we have all been waiting for!!

by Should Kosovo be admitted to FIDE? @ 25 Mar 2008 06:32 am

Should Kosovo be admitted to FIDE? <br /> <br />Are you kidding me?? Ask the Russians. <br />I hope all Texans separate from USA soon as well, and then join Mexico.

by Mikh. Golubev @ 26 Mar 2008 01:53 am

Congratulatinos! These ratings were really needed. (Poor FIDE could not do it, of course).

by D* @ 05 Apr 2008 11:37 am

thanks a lot! very important!

by Doru Cojoc @ 27 Apr 2008 04:59 pm

Thanks a lot! I got the Excel file, but what is the header of that table? I have rows with players, and I assume each column is a year and or quarter, but I do not know which is which.