So to kick things off, who is everyone's favorite chess master from history, pre-Kasparov?
Mine's Paul Morphy, a nineteenth-century teen prodigy from Louisiana, who beat most of the world's best players of the 1850s but then suddenly retired at the age of 21. He then lived a very strange and eccentric life and unfortunately died at the young age of 47 from a stroke.
https://www.chess.com/players/paul-morphy
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-chess-champions-dominanceand-madness-4307709/