August Top 25 Women's Rankings: Vaishali to No. 3, Divya +10!

You’ve been waiting for it, and now it’s finally here: the new Top 25 rankings! These are the rankings for August. I meant to write this post back in early August, but never got around to it ...until now!

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 (August 2024)

This set of rankings includes everything up to the end of July. That means it includes the Belt & Road rapid tournament (won by Tan Zhongyi), but not the Belt & Road classical tournament (also won by Tan Zhongyi).

Other big tournaments since the May rankings include TePe Sigeman, the Sharjah Masters & Challengers, Norway Chess, the Cairns Cup, and the Biel Challengers. Some tournaments that no longer count towards the past 12 months include the last Women’s World Championship match, the Nicosia last leg of the 2022-23 FIDE Women’s Grand Prix, and last year’s Cairns Cup.

Here are the rankings!

The August 2024 Top 25! Credit: @OnTheQueenside.

Newcomers!

Welcome to the Top 25, Stavroula Tsolakidou and Leya Garifullina!

Stavroula Tsolakidou, my top Rising Star to watch for 2024, is back in the Top 25. She was already No. 24 back in January mainly on the strength of her GM norm last year, but was pushed out in the last edition just because of one too many newcomers. I said if she just had one good tournament she would return, and sure enough she finished runner-up at the Belt & Road rapid tournament in China behind only Tan Zhongyi. This was a very strong super-Swiss that also featured Ju Wenjun and Aleksandra Goryachkina, making it even stronger than the Grand Prix events. Runner-up is an exceptional result in that kind of field!

Leya Garifullina has been pushing towards the Top 25 and is now finally in on the strength of her runner-up in the Sharjah Challengers. That was good for a performance around 2550-level, and she finished only behind Divya Deshmukh. Garifullina also had a performance around 2550-level at last year’s Grand Swiss, where she came in 5th place!

India on fire!

India, be proud! The three biggest gainers in this set of rankings were all from India.

Vaishali is now No. 3 in the world! Unless you’ve been living under a rock when it comes to following chess tournaments, you probably saw Vaishali cause a stir in Biel, where she played in the Challengers alongside Pragg in the Masters. The Challengers was no joke. Vaishali was the last seed out of six. The other participants were all GMs over 2500, and four out of five were over 2620! That didn’t stop Vaishali from rampaging through the qualifier rounds, starting off with three consecutive wins, including two back-to-back against 2600+ GMs Jonas Buhl Bjerre and Alexander Donchenko, the second of which may be the favourite for Game of the Year. Overall, her performance in the classical was 2671, a career-best and the third time in the past 12 months she has had a GM norm level performance. The only other woman who has done that is Ju Wenjun. That’s how Vaishali got up to No. 3.

Vaishali and Pragg both got bronze in the Biel Challengers and Masters! Vaishali’s result was incredible, while Pragg appears to have eaten his medal (where did it go???). Credit: Biel International Chess Festival.

Harika is now No. 9 in the world. Harika has consistently put up solid performances all year, nothing too great but nothing so bad either. But just recently in July, Harika finally did have a great result, finishing the Turkish League as the top-scoring woman with 7/9 and a performance just short of 2600. That was the big performance she had been missing to get back in the Top 10.

For all of Vaishali and Harika’s greatness, the biggest gainer of them all was Divya Deshmukh. Divya was only No. 21 in May, but now she’s already up to No. 11. She must have done a lot to jump that high so fast, and she did. She won the Sharjah Challengers, the strongest open any woman has won since Lei Tingjie won the Sevilla Open over six years ago. This performance was also very close to 2600 / GM-norm-level. If that wasn’t enough, Divya followed this up by winning the girls’ World Junior Championship. Back-to-back tournament wins in big Swiss tournaments, almost unheard of! Both in terms of results and performance level, Divya is killing it!

Divya Deshmukh had an amazing summer string of tournaments! Credit: Sharjah Chess Club.

Grand Prix rejects

Take a look at the rankings from No. 10 and No. 15. Besides Vaishali, that’s your group of the top up-and-coming young stars trying to make it in the world elite. Naturally, you would think they would obviously all be competing in the top women’s tournaments (i.e. the FIDE Women’s Grand Prix), right?

Only half of them are actually in the Grand Prix. Nurgyul Salimova is the only one that qualified directly, while Bibisara Assaubayeva and Divya Deshmukh are in on wild cards. The other three — Zhu Jiner, Polina Shuvalova, and Dinara Wagner — are all out. This is especially surprising given that all three played in the last Grand Prix series and did well. In particular, Zhu Jiner medalled in two out of three legs and finished third in the overall standings for the whole series, while Dinara Wagner won a leg outright. Yet that wasn’t enough for FIDE to bring them back.

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That's the Top 25 for August! Expect the next rankings in November, either at the beginning or the end. Since I’m so late with making this post, the good news is we already know some of what to expect in that edition. Alina Kashlinskaya won a Grand Prix leg, so she’ll be displacing someone. Also of note, last year’s World Cup will no longer count towards the most recent 12 months, putting a lot of players in danger of dropping a little or a lot by the time the next rankings are out. The Olympiad may be the only big tournament replacing it.

The other piece of good news is that someone was able to help me download all the tournament data for all of the players. That might make it feasible to automate the rankings in the near future. Be on the lookout for that! But in the meantime, enjoy the Olympiad!

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