Erik is the oldest player on the Top 65+ list at age 95. Here’s one of his games from last weekend’s Chicago Class, where he gained another seven rating points.
While he was over 2200 on MSA, he first made master years before this. But not that many years: he was never a master in his native Latvia, and he was relatively inactive in US chess until after 1960.
Could someone help me pin down when Mr. Karklins first broke 2200? It may well have been after the age of 65!
According to the milestones page, he first made Master in September of 1992.
In this case, that means that although he had an established rating as of the beginning of the computerized records we have available, his floor was 1900 or lower, so that means he probably had not hit 2200 prior to then.
Interesting. His recollection (and mine) was that he made master sometime in the early 1980s, but I haven’t found such a listing yet. (I’m looking at crosstables from old Illinois Chess Bulletins.) His results were uneven in his youth (note that he nosedived well below 2200 in his very next 1992 event), so it’s possible that something similar happened in the 1980s.
If he first made it in 1992, and he was born in 1915, the rest of us have hope!
The first listing I found over 2200 was in the Jan. 1984 annual list: 2209. In the 1986 cumulative list, he’s 2294.
– Hal Terrie
Thank you!
I’ll have to go back and look at the data that was used for creating the Milestones records, it sounds like there could be other masters affected by this. I doubt I’ll have time to look at this until well after the US Open.