Hikaru Nakamura explained his motivation for gaining rating on Chess.com. Nakamura says that certain players often compared online ratings with official FIDE ratings. Nakamura notes that this inspired him to ‘farm to the maximum’.

Hikaru Nakamura

Hikaru Nakamura

World's No. 2

“Many people are probably wondering why am I chasing this record or what is the purpose?

I will mention — and I’m not trying to be a little bit negative or anything along those lines — but I will say that one of my biggest inspirations for pushing this farming to the max were the incidents over the last couple of years where certain players were talking about streaks, saying things about players’ ratings over-the-board versus online, etc.

I don’t need to go into detail in terms of what that entails. But I will say that that has provided the big motivation and inspiration to really push this farming thing to the maximum. To try to create some content out of it as well.”

Hikaru Nakamura achieved a new peak Blitz rating of 3500 on Chess.com on October 5. He surpassed the previous platform record of 3488 points set by himself last week. The gap between Nakamura and the second-highest rated player, Magnus Carlsen, is 100 points.

Credit: Yoav Nisenbaum / FIDE