VietNamNet Bridge - In the rankings released by FIDE on March 1, Vietnam’s top chessman Le Quang Liem maintained Elo 2709 but he slipped by five spots from the previous month.

Liem did not play in February so his Elo rating was unchanged. However, if he performed successful in the HD Cup in HCM City this month, Liem will have a chance to improve his position.

Liem’s schoolmate at the Webster University (USA) - So Wesley also fell two spots for the same reason.

In the Asian ranking, Liem was in the seventh place, behind super international grandmasters like Viswanathan Anand (India, 2770), Wesley So (Philippines, 2738), Wang Hao (China, 2734), Ding Liren (China, 2717), Wang Yue (China, 2717), and Harikrishna (India, 2714).

The world number one chess player Magnus Carlsen (Norway) continued to break his own world record for reaching the highest Elo rating in the history – 2881, from 2872 in the previous month.

Behind Carlsen in the top 10 are: Levon Aronian (Armenia, 2830), Vladimir Kramnik (Russia, 2787), Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria, 2785), Fabiano Caruana (Italy, 2783), Alexander Grischuk (Russia, 2777), Hikaru Nakamura (USA, 2772), Viswanathan Anand (India, 2770), Sergey Karjakin (Russia, 2766), and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France, 2758).

Nam Nguyen