Gukesh had an amazing result at the Olympiad. Let's see how it compares to other great performances. Last year, my article "MinStrength: An Alternative to Performance Rating" was published on ChessBase. The problem with performance ratings is that a perfect score always leads to an infinite performance - even against very weak opposition. By that metric, my 2/2 at the 2024 Virginia State Championship was better than Caruana's 2014 Sinquefield Cup. Obviously Caruana is the stronger player.
In the article, I explained, "MinStrength asks, 'Who would not be expected to score as well as you did?' Consider a 1500 player. Sometimes they have a bad tournament and play like a 1300. But there are other times when they perform at the 1700 level. But even in their best tournament ever, they don’t perform at the 2700 level and earn a GM norm. That is outside of their range. How low would your rating have to be for a result to be outside of your range? That is your minimum strength, or MinStrength."
Gukesh scored 9.0/10 and his average opponent was 2690. That leads to a MinStrength of 2758, which is the second highest of all time. He is only behind Caruana's 2014 Sinquefield Cup (MinStrength 2830). He is ahead of many great performances, such as Karpov in Linares 1994 and Fischer's 6-0 victory against Larsen.
