Once again Gary Kasparov and Nigel Short have been omitted from the semiannual international rating published by the World Chess Federation (FIDE) in January.
The omission is, of course, in retaliation for their 1993 breakaway world-title match in London.
And by default the FIDE world champion, Anatoly Karpov, is again top man, although his listed rating is more than 60 points below Kasparov's unpublished estimated rating.
In turn Karpov is 25 points ahead of India's Viswanathan Anand, who is second (or third if you include Kasparov).
No more than 10 points separates each of the next 100 players.
The only woman among the top 100 is Judit Polgar of Budapest, who is tied for 19th place - an admirable achievement for the 17-year-old but a telltale sign of the egregious gender inequality persisting in chess.
A sublist of the top 35 players has its own story to tell.
Eight Russians (including Karpov and 18-year-old Vladimir Kramnik, who is tied for third) make up the largest national group among the 35.
Incredibly, 11 other Russians from the top 35 are now emigres.
Four of those now live in the United States, two each in Germany and Israel, and one each in Bulgaria, Hungary and Switzerland.
The four residing in the United States - 19-year-old Gata Kamsky (ranked sixth in the world at 2,695), Gregory Kaidanov, Alex Yermolinsky and Boris Gulko - together with former U.S. champion Joel Benjamin are the five top-ranked players in the country.
A continuing trend is the accelerated precocity of today's young players. There are three other teenagers on the top-100 list in addition to Kramnik, Kamsky and Polgar. Most notable is the 16-year-old Hungarian prodigy Zoltna Almasi, who is tied for 37th place.
- TO WIN - If you want to become a world-class player, you must not only handle winning positions forcefully, but also you must win from positions in which you stand worse.
There will always be those days on which your opening goes sour or you play a muddled game or underestimate the opponent.
Some of them will defeat you, but if you intend to reach the top, you must steel yourself to hang on for the opportunity to hoodwink the enemy.
There is no set way to do that. Sometimes stubborn passive resistance is the answer, while at other times bluffing an attack that doesn't really exist is the plan of choice.
Still other occasions are best served by feigning greater weakness, thus prompting the opponent to overreach himself and overlook your suddenly lethal resources.