Nakamura on Kasparov:

I think mainly it’s the opening preparation he did with his team over the past 20, 25 years of his chess career. That’s really the strength of working with someone like Kasparov. It’s his opening preparation, because a lot of his wins came from just getting good positions out of openings against players. So, it’s mainly just looking at openings and working from there. There are other things like studies and some endgames but it’s pretty much the openings.

Oh right, so he doesn’t sort of look at particular middlegames that much with you?

No, like I said, his strength was in openings. You look at middlegames or endgames and I’m quite convinced there are other players who were better than he was but he was able to get advantages out of the opening, so that was his main strength. And when he wasn’t able to do that that’s why he lost his title to Kramnik.

---------------------------

Disclaimer: Naka's words, not mine

thank you very much varelse, YEAH NAKAMURA ROCKS!!!!!! 

his home-made openings were backfiring at the time and hoped for some improvement from Gazza, who played mostly openings (games were over quickly usually)

Naka has since corrected that statement. He has said repeatedly since then Kasparov was great in the middle game too. When Naka said that, he had just split from Kasparov. Apparently, there was some bad feelings at the time.

Fischer and Kasparov had chosen the same openings with Black: Najdorf (Sicilian) and King's Indian!

Fischer's opening preparation was concentrated on about 30 games per line. (He had to find these games in books and (Russian) Chess papers.)

Kasparov was one of the first players who used ChessBase (the first professional Chess Database) for opening preparation. With one click he had about a 100 of games in a line (many more than Fischer's 30 games)! This effect Lars Bo Hansen did not mention! (Why not?)

In 2000 German Chess paper "SCHACH" was asking (about 20 GM) who was the player of the Century: 1 Fischer, 2 Kasparov, 3 Lasker.

GM Cvitan pointed out to me that Fischer's self training impressed him more than Kasparov's (Russian = Botvinnik's) Chess school. (How true!)

Kortschnoj voted for Kasparov. This shows a very subjective aspect: Kortschnoj was near his peak in the 1970ies. He was never very impressed by Fischer. At Kasparov's peak Kortschnoj was a "weaker" player than before. So his comparision cannot be very objective ...

By the way in 1992 there was no rating of Fischer! Kasparov said Fischer's strength will be 2650. Yasser Seirawan however stated for the first game of Fischer's 1992 match game: "In this game Fischer's rating would be far beyond 2700!"

Kasparov had already won the WCC from the nearly invincible Karpov long before ChessBase was invented.

Based on your own assessment that superior athletes are victors over their contemporaries...Mohammed Ali was at least twice the athlete Mike Tyson ever thought about being. Mike Tyson wasn't even a good boxer. He was an intimidating slugger.

If you think either Evander Holyfield or James "Buster" Douglas gave Tyson a boxing lesson, neither were on Ali's level as a boxer. Ali was a great boxer and a ring genius. Evander was merely a good boxer and a good power punching slugger, with an iron chin and body, great heart and the endurance of a zebra. Ali had all of those traits of Holyfield and then some namely great defense and elusiveness.

Holyfield out boxed Tyson clearly, after Tyson bully tactics and intimidation wouldn't work, like it had on so many before. Tyson came out flat against Douglas, whose mother had recently died. I would have wanted to hit somebody too, really hard and try to shock the world.

You can try to make a case that Tyson was past his prime when he fought Holyfield and that the lack of training, the drugs and Japanese prostitutes legitimize Tyson's prowess more when he actually tried his best, considering he still nearly K.O.ed Buster, I'll buy them both for a dollar...but if you insist these two things add up to victory over Ali for Tyson, it will fall on deaf ears fast... I'll save my money for a new Beltone, with a mute feature...

Ali at his peak, while rarely beaten, was always beatable.

there was always those Forman's or Frasier's out there, one lucky punch from taking the title from him.

To survive, Ali needed to adapt, to switch up tactics, to constanly surprise his oponents with something new. And it didn't always work.

But often enough, it did.

Tyson, at his peak, was simply invincible. He stood like Kilimanjaro over the rest of the world. Nobody would climb into the ring with him. few who faced him made it to rond 2.

Nobody ever saw round 3.

Then came Tyson's downfall. And it was swift. He was a pale shadow of his former self. But that could not erase the great things he acheived while he was on top.

Comparison of top chess players throughout history

This article presents a number of methodologies that have been suggested for the task of comparing the greatest chess players in history. Statistical methods offer objectivity but, whilst there is agreement on systems to rate the strengths of current players, there is disagreement on whether such techniques can be applied to players from different generations who never competed against each other.

Statistical methods

Elo system

Perhaps the best-known statistical model is that devised by Arpad Elo in 1960 and further elaborated on in his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present,^[1] he gave ratings to players corresponding to their performance over the best five-year span of their career. According to this system the highest ratings achieved were:

• 2725: José Raúl Capablanca
• 2720: Mikhail Botvinnik, Emanuel Lasker
• 2700: Mikhail Tal
• 2690: Alexander Alekhine, Paul Morphy, Vasily Smyslov.

(Though published in 1978, Elo's list did not include five-year averages for Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. It did list January 1978 ratings of 2780 for Fischer and 2725 for Karpov.^[2])

In 1970, FIDE adopted Elo's system for rating current players, so one way to compare players of different eras is to compare their Elo ratings. The best-ever Elo ratings are tabulated below.^[3]

As of March 2013, there were 89 chess grandmasters in history who broke the 2700 limit and only six of them exceeded 2800. Particularly notable are the peak ratings of Fischer, Karpov and Kasparov, who achieved their peak ratings in earlier years (1972, 1994, and 1999 respectively).

Table of top 20 rated players ever, with date their best ratings were first achieved

Rank	Rating	Player	Year-month
1	2872	Magnus Carlsen	2013-02
2	2851	Garry Kasparov	1999-07
3	2825	Levon Aronian	2012-05
4	2817	Viswanathan Anand	2011-03
5	2813	Veselin Topalov	2006-07
6	2810[4]	Vladimir Kramnik	2013-01
7	2793	Teimour Radjabov	2012-11
8	2788	Alexander Morozevich	2008-07
9	2788	Sergey Karjakin	2011-07
10	2787	Vassily Ivanchuk	2007-10
11	2786	Hikaru Nakamura	2012-10
12	2786	Fabiano Caruana	2012-11
13	2785	Bobby Fischer	1972-04
14	2780	Anatoly Karpov	1994-07
15	2773	Alexander Grischuk	2011-01
16	2772	Shakhriyar Mamedyarov	2011-01
17	2768	Ruslan Ponomariov	2011-07
18	2765	Peter Svidler	2011-07
19	2763	Peter Leko	2005-04
20	2762	Gata Kamsky	2012-11

Average rating over time

The average Elo rating of top players has risen over time. For instance, the average of the top 10 active players rose from 2751 in July 2000 to 2787 in March 2012, a 36-point increase in about 12 years.

The average rating of the top 100 players, meanwhile, increased from 2644 to 2700, a 56-point increase.^[5]

Many people believe that this rise is mostly due to a system artifact known as ratings inflation, making it impractical to compare players of different eras.^[6]

Arpad Elo was of the opinion that it was futile to attempt to use ratings to compare players from different eras; in his view, they could only possibly measure the strength of a player as compared to his or her contemporaries. He also stated that the process of rating players was in any case rather approximate; he compared it to "the measurement of the position of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of agitated water with a yard stick tied to a rope and which is swaying in the wind".^[7]

Chessmetrics

Many statisticians since Elo have devised similar methods to retrospectively rate players. Jeff Sonas' rating system is called "Chessmetrics". This system takes account of many games played after the publication of Elo's book, and claims to take account of the rating inflation that the Elo system has allegedly suffered.

One caveat is that a Chessmetrics rating takes into account the frequency of play. According to Sonas, "As soon as you go a month without playing, your Chessmetrics rating will start to drop".^[8] While it may be in the best interest of the fans for chess-players to remain active, it is not clear why a person's rating, which reflects his/her skill at chess, should drop if the player is inactive for a period of time.

Sonas, like Elo, acknowledges that it is impossible to compare the strength of players from different eras, saying:

Of course, a rating always indicates the level of dominance of a particular player against contemporary peers; it says nothing about whether the player is stronger/weaker in their actual technical chess skill than a player far removed from them in time. So while we cannot say that Bobby Fischer in the early 1970s or José Capablanca in the early 1920s were the "strongest" players of all time, we can say with a certain amount of confidence that they were the two most dominant players of all time. That is the extent of what these ratings can tell us.^[9]

Nevertheless Sonas' Web site does compare players from different eras, and shows that in such cases the Chessmetrics system is rather sensitive to the length of the periods being compared. Including data until December 2004, the rankings were:

In 2005,^[15] Sonas used Chessmetrics to evaluate historical annual performance ratings and came to the conclusion that Kasparov was dominant for the most years, followed by Karpov and Lasker. He also published a list of the highest ratings ever attained according to calculations done at the start of each month, which looks like this:^[16]

Rank	Rating	Player
1	2895	Bobby Fischer
2	2886	Garry Kasparov
3	2885	Mikhail Botvinnik
4	2878	Emanuel Lasker
5	2877	José Capablanca
6	2860	Alexander Alekhine
7	2848	Anatoly Karpov
8	2833	Viswanathan Anand
9	2826	Vladimir Kramnik
10	2826	Wilhelm Steinitz

Warriors of the Mind

In contrast to Elo and Sonas's systems, Raymond Keene and Nathan Divinsky's book Warriors of the Mind^[17] attempts to establish a rating system claiming to compare directly the strength of players active in different eras, and so determine the strongest player of all time. Considering games played between sixty-four of the strongest players in history, they come up with the following top ten:^[18]

These "Divinsky numbers" are not on the same scale as Elo ratings (the last person on the list, Johannes Zukertort, has a Divinsky number of 873, which would be a beginner-level Elo rating). Keene and Divinsky's system has met with limited acceptance,^[19] and Warriors of the Mind has also been accused of arbitrarily selecting players and bias towards modern players.^[20]

Moves played compared with computer choices

A computer-based method of analyzing chess abilities across history came from Matej Guid and Ivan Bratko from the Department of Computer and Information Science of University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2006.^[21] The basis for their evaluation was the difference between the position values resulting from the moves played by the human chess player and the moves chosen as best by the chess program Crafty. They also compared the average number of errors in the player's game. Opening moves were excluded, in an attempt to negate the progress in chess opening theory.

The method received a number of criticisms, including: the study used a modified version of Crafty rather than the standard version; even the standard version of Crafty was not strong enough to evaluate the world champions' play; one of the modifications restricted the search depth to 12 half-moves, which is often insufficient.^[22] As of 2006 Crafty's Elo rating was 2657, below many historical top human players and several other computer programs.

A similar project was conducted in 2007 using Rybka 2.3.2a and a modified version of Crafty 20.14.^[23] It arrived at the following results:^[24][25]

An analysis done with Rybka 3 and comparisons with modern ratings can be found at http://web.zone.ee/chessanalysis/summary450.pdf.

Subjective lists

Several prominent players and writers have attempted to rank the greatest players. Generally these lists attempt to combine the two methods above—performance, and analysis of games.

Bobby Fischer (1964)

In 1964 Bobby Fischer listed his top 10 in Chessworld magazine: Morphy, Staunton, Steinitz, Tarrasch, Chigorin, Alekhine, Capablanca, Spassky, Tal, Reshevsky.^[26][27] He considered Morphy the best, saying "In a set match he would beat anyone alive today."^[28]

Irving Chernev (1976)

In 1976 chess author Irving Chernev published the book The Golden Dozen, in which he ranked his all-time top twelve: 1. Capablanca, 2. Alekhine, 3. Lasker, 4. Fischer, 5. Botvinnik, 6. Petrosian, 7. Tal, 8. Smyslov, 9. Spassky, 10. Bronstein, 11. Rubinstein, and 12. Nimzowitsch.^[29]

Viswanathan Anand (2000, 2008 and 2012)

In 2000, when Karpov, Korchnoi and Kasparov were still active, Anand listed his top 10 as: Fischer, Morphy, Lasker, Capablanca, Steinitz, Tal, Korchnoi, Keres, Karpov and Kasparov.^[30]

When interviewed shortly after Fischer's death, he ranked Fischer and Kasparov as the greatest with Kasparov a little ahead by virtue of being on top for many years.^[31]

In 2012, Anand stated that he considered Fischer as the greatest on account of the hurdles he faced.^[32]

Chess Informant readers (2001)

Svetozar Gligorić reported in his book Shall We Play Fischerandom Chess? :

At the beginning of 2001 a large poll for the "Ten Greatest Chess Players of the 20th Century, selected by Chess Informant readers" resulted in Fischer having the highest percentage of votes and finishing as No. 1, ahead of Kasparov, Alekhine, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Karpov, Tal, Lasker, Anand and Korchnoi.^[33]

David Edmonds and John Eidinow (2004)

BBC award-winning journalists, from their book Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time :

Fischer, some will maintain, was the outstanding player in chess history, though there are powerful advocates too for Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, and Kasparov. Many chess players will dismiss such comparisons as meaningless, akin to the futile attempt to grade the supreme musicians of all time. But the manner in which Fischer stormed his way to Reykjavik, his breathtaking dominance at the Palma de Majorca Interzonal, the trouncings of Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian—all this was unprecedented. There never has been an era in modern chess during which one player has so overshadowed all others.^[34]

Vladimir Kramnik (2005, 2011)

In a 2005 interview, Vladimir Kramnik (World Champion 2000 to 2007) stated, "The other world champions had something 'missing'. I can't say the same about Kasparov: he can do everything."^[35]

In an interview in 2011, Vladimir Kramnik said about Anand: "I always considered him to be a colossal talent, one of the greatest in the whole history of chess", "I think that in terms of play Anand is in no way weaker than Kasparov", and "In the last 5–6 years he's made a qualitative leap that's made it possible to consider him one of the great chess players".^[36]

Leonard Barden (2008)

In his 2008 obituary of Bobby Fischer, Leonard Barden wrote that most experts ranked Kasparov as the greatest ever, with either Fischer or Karpov second.^[37]

Levon Aronian (2012)

In a 2012 interview, Levon Aronian stated that he considers Alexander Alekhine the greatest player of all time.^[38]

Magnus Carlsen (2012)

In 2012, Magnus Carlsen said that Kasparov is the greatest player of all time, saying that while Fischer may have been better at his best, Kasparov remained at the top for much longer.^[39]

World Champions by world title reigns

The number of world championship wins, or world championship reigns, is considered by some as a measure of chess greatness. The table below organises the world champions in order of championship wins. (For the purpose of this table, a successful defence counts as a win, even if the match was drawn.) The table is made more complicated by the split between the "Classical" and FIDE world titles between 1993 and 2006.

Great, yet another example of a complete disregard for copyright. You just copied the wiki entry.

Brilliant.

Sue me...

Lol good answer.

I didn't take it, steal, make money off it,etc...I just made the site available here...they should pay me for the free advertising...

I agree to be sued for the amount of money I make -50%

Carlsen said it quite accurately:

Fischer was better, but Kasparov held the throne longer.

Kasparov first won WCC in 1985. In 1988 ChessBase was on the market (first on Atari computers). These 3 years are exactly one WCC-period. But in those years there were serveral WCC's (match, revenge) ...

i'm waiting to see what god says. saves me the bother of looking at nameno's post.

btw thank you very much nameno.

I still think fischer is overrated.

might look that way after rating inflation adjustment ... hehe hahaha!!

Nope, I mean how people see him. He is just overrated.