Stev Bonhage / Anastasia Korolkova / Anna Shtourman
October Top 25 Women's Rankings: Divya to No. 6, & Hello Kashlinskaya!
Welcome to the Top 10!I said I wouldn’t release another Top 25 rankings until November, but after the amazing success that was the Budapest Olympiad, I didn't want to wait until next month!
If you’re new or you haven’t seen my previous sets of rankings, these are the Top 25 women’s chess players based on both results and performance across all OTB formats in the past two years, with emphasis on classical and the most recent 12 months. (Check out here for the full methodology.)
New rankings (October 2024)
This set of rankings includes everything up to the end of September. Besides the Olympiad, the other big tournament for this set of rankings was the first leg of the new 2024-25 FIDE Women’s Grand Prix, which kicked off in Tbilisi, Georgia. The other major change affecting the rankings is that last year’s World Cup no longer counts towards the most recent 12 months.
Here are the new rankings!
The October 2024 Top 25. Credit: @OnTheQueenside.
Youth arriving in the Top 10
If you were paying attention to the Olympiad, you probably already know that a lot of the top-rated women sat out of the Olympiad. As a result, there aren’t any changes in the Top 5. But there were still a lot of changes in the rest of the Top 10!
Not only does 18-year-old Divya Deshmukh make her Top 10 debut, she’s already up to No. 6! Her performance level in her best five tournaments over the past two years (Olympiad, Sharjah Challengers, GRENKE Open, Polish League, and Tata Steel India Rapid) is very close to 2600. The only others who can really say that about their best tournaments are Ju Wenjun and Vaishali. With all of those elite performances, she’s already primed to challenge Vaishali for the No. 1 Indian spot on the list.
Divya Deshmukh is now the No. 2 Indian player on the list behind only Vaishali! Credit: Michal Walusza.
Divya isn’t the only young debutant in the Top 10. Also joining the Top 10 is Zhu Jiner at No. 9. I have to keep reminding you that 21-year-old Zhu Jiner is currently the youngest woman in the world with the GM title because I don’t think she gets enough credit for that. In case you missed it, she already made another (extra) GM norm in Menorca back in April. At the Olympiad, she came close to another 2600 performance even though the field should have been too weak to do that. All in all, Zhu Jiner’s 2597 TPR on Board 1 earned her the Board 1 individual gold medal by a decent margin. I’ve already said it didn't make sense for FIDE to leave her out of the Grand Prix. But she’s Top 10 now. Maybe someone should invite her to a 2600 super-tournament instead.
Zhu Jiner is not far away from joining China's elite at the top! Credit: Maria Emelianova.
The third young player to enter the Top 10 is another obvious name, 20-year-old Bibisara Assaubayeva, coming in at No. 10. Bibisara had two great results since the last rankings. She finished runner-up in the Tbilisi Women’s Grand Prix leg. Then she led Kazakhstan to silver on Board 1 at the Olympiad. That was Kazakhstan’s first-ever medal at the Olympiad for either the women’s or open teams. A more than deserving way to enter the Top 10.
“Mom’s back to chess!”
What do Alina Kashlinskaya, Sara Khadem, and Nana Dzagnidze all have in common? They all took some time off from chess recently because they just became moms (in Nana’s case, not for the first time!), and now they’re all back in the Top 25! (Technically, they weren’t in my Top 25 before, but for sure they would have been if I had compiled rankings before this year.)
There have been studies that new moms — on average — lose rating after becoming moms. But that’s only on average. It doesn’t apply to everyone and it certainly doesn’t appear to apply to Alina Kashlinskaya. Her first tournament of the year was the Polish women’s national championship, and she won that. Then, she played the Tbilisi Women’s Grand Prix leg as a one-off replacement player and won that, even though she never won or even medalled in the Grand Prix before. All in all with the Olympiad, which also went well, she’s gained +25 Elo since coming back. Even though she wasn’t ranked in the last Top 25, she’s all the way up to No. 11 on this one.
Without evening playing much, Alina Kashlinskaya is at maybe the best form of her career! Credit: Anna Shtourman.
Things haven’t gone as smoothly for Sara Khadem. She’s had ups and downs, with her biggest down being her last-place finish in the Grand Prix leg. But her ups have been big ups, and she put down an exclamation mark by earning the Board 1 individual silver medal at the Olympiad, only behind Zhu Jiner. Her team Spain also fared well, unexpectedly coming in 4th place, the biggest surprise I think of any of the top finishers. Combining that with her national championship late last year and she’s up to No. 15 in this Top 25 even though she wasn’t ranked in the last one.
The last return player to the Top 25 is the most accomplished, Nana Dzagnidze. Like Sara, it hasn’t gone so smoothly lately. She had the most winning positions at the Cairns Cup, but also the worst conversion rate. Nevertheless, she made up for it at the Olympiad, earning the Board 1 individual bronze medal right behind Sara. In case you didn’t know, for all of Georgia’s great women players, Nana is the highest-rated Georgian woman in history, and the 12th-highest-rated woman ever. She’s No. 19 on this list, and she’s not going away just yet.
This is almost certainly the last Top 25 of the year. The next one will be in January after another Grand Prix leg, Tata Steel India, and most notably the revamped World Rapid and Blitz Championships. Will that next set of rankings be automated? Only time will tell.
For now, the chess season still isn’t over. The rest of the year is still jam-packed with big events. Don’t forget to enjoy it!
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