by: joeyj : 01 February 2013
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The official FIDE ratings for February 2013 has been published with GM Magnus Carlsen breaking his previous ‘All-Time-High’ rating of 2861 (January 2013) to the ‘New-All-Time-High’ rating of 2872 and that is a +11 higher.
This ‘New-All-Time-High’ official rating record of 2872 was accomplished by Magnus Carlsen at the 75th Tata Steel Chess Tournament on 12 – 27 January 2013 in De Moriaan Center in the Dutch sea resort of Wijk aan Zee.

The De Moriaan Center: Venue of Tata Steel 2013
At Wijk aan Zee, Carlsen scored 10.0/13 points with a rating performance (Rp) of 2933 and winning this prestigious major tournament (Category 20; ave rating of 2732) pulling away from the field of 14 players with a +1.5 points margin to the 2nd placer GM Levon Aronian who scored 8.5/13 points.
Magnus Carlsen round-by-round results at Tata Steel 2013 showed that he also broke his own unofficial all-time high ‘Live Rating’ record of 2863.6 (recorded in R6 at 2012 London Chess Classic on December 7, 2012) when he defeated GM Hikaru Nakamura in R12 and registered a new all-time high ‘Live Rating’ record of 2874.1 on January 26, 2013.

R1 (Caruana), R2 (Aronian) & R3 (van Wely)
Round-by-round result of Magnus Carlsen @ Tata Steel 2013 Group ‘A’.

R4(Harikrishna), R5(Anand) & R6(Sokolov)

R7(Leko), R8(Karjakin) & R9(Hou, Yifan)

R10( L’Ami), R11(Wang) & R12(Nakamura)
Carlsen final round (R13) drawn game against GM Anish Giri registered a live rating of 2872.3 that was converted to 2872 in FIDE’s official February 2013 rating list, the new official World’s highest rating ever recorded in history.
As of February 1, 2013 … “The All-Time Top Rated Chess Grandmasters”, with dates their respective best or peak ratings were first achieved and using former World Champion (12th) Anatoly Karpov‘s peak rating of 2780 as the benchmark, are as follows:
Rank |
Peak Rating |
Player |
FED |
Date Achieved (mm/dd/year) |
1 |
2872 |
Magnus Carlsen | NOR |
2/1/2013 |
2 |
2851 |
Garry Kasparov | RUS |
7/1/1999 |
3 |
2825 |
Levon Aronian | ARM |
5/1/2012 |
4 |
2817 |
Viswanathan Anand | IND |
3/1/2011 |
5 |
2813 |
Veselin Topalov | BUL |
7/1/2006 |
6 |
2811 |
Vladimir Kramnik | RUS |
1/1/2002 |
7 |
2793 |
Teimour Radjabov | AZE |
11/1/2012 |
8 |
2788 |
Alexander Morozevich | RUS |
7/1/2008 |
9 |
2788 |
Sergey Karjakin | RUS |
7/1/2011 |
10 |
2787 |
Vassily Ivanchuk | UKR |
10/1/2007 |
11 |
2786 |
Hikaru Nakamura | USA |
10/1/2012 |
12 |
2786 |
Fabiano Caruana | ITA |
11/1/2012 |
13 |
2785 |
Robert Fischer | USA |
7/1/1972 |
14 |
2780 |
Anatoly Karpov | RUS |
7/1/1994 |
See related article: Magnus Carlsen breaks Kasparov’s rating records (1 Jan 2013)