April 2020 FIDE Rating List

World Champion and world no. 1 Magnus Carlsen played just one Norwegian League game that counted for the April 2020 FIDE rating list (gaining 0.8 points), but the Candidates Tournament has shaken up the standings at the top. Ding Liren’s disastrous 2667 performance has seen the Chinese no. 1 drop out of the 2800 club for the first time since August 2018, while there were two clear winners.
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave’s win over Ian Nepomniachtchi in Round 7 meant he was the top performer and climbed three places into the Top 5 with a 2876 performance, but Nepo’s 2875 wasn’t too shabby and took the 29-year-old to a new career best 2784 and world no. 4. Here’s the new Top 20, showing the changes from March:

Women’s April 2020 FIDE Rating List

21-year-old Aleksandra Goryachkina is the player to set a new career best of 2582 on the women’s list after finishing joint top of the Lausanne FIDE Women’s Grand Prix and picking up 3 rating points, while Nana Dzagnidze, who took first on tiebreaks, gained 15 points to re-enter the Top 10. The big loser was Women’s World Champion Ju Wenjun, who finally “hit the wall” after the World Championship match and the Cairns Cup in St. Louis, losing 3 games in Lausanne. That cost 23 rating points, but just one place on the rating list:

Junior April 2020 FIDE List

The rise of Andrey Esipenko continued, with wins over Boris Gelfand and Evgeniy Najer in the Nutcracker Battle of the Generations in Moscow seeing him gain another 10 points to climb to exactly world no. 50 on the overall rating list. The Russian, who turned 18 last month, also gained experience by working as a second for Kirill Alekseenko (alongside Peter Svidler and Daniil Yuffa), and moved up one place ahead of Parham Maghsoodloo.