checked chess database.
Morphy won 74% of his games, lost 9%
Capablanca and fischer had similar 60% win. Capablanca loss rate was a bit less than 20%, which is impressive.
#OneMorphy
What player in history probably has the best win to lose ratio?
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Does the Morphy count include a lot of nonmatch nontournament games?
Feb 3, 2019
0
#64
Some are skeptic about Morphy because he played 'weak' players. Three things:
- You compare players to whatever knowledge they had at the time
- Substantial evidence that Morphy did not study chess much, nowhere close to his European counterparts did.
- He is an extremely precise player (check engines) but he does go wild when he knows he is winning. This precision, as pointed out by Fischer (who said Morphy would beat anyone today) is the closest we have to an objective comparison of players across time. But it is imperfect. More recent players, have seen more games, and have engines.
- The 75%/10% win/loss ratio includes blinfold games and games with odds of a pawn or an entire piece.
- At that time, there was no clock. So his opponents took hours and hours (documented) which frustrated Morphy, who is known to play under 5 minutes mostly.
Who is the mozart of chess? He actually hummed an entire opera after listening to it once. He could have been perhaps the mozart of music too 
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"Lasker ... didn't understand positional chess." - another Fischer quote from around the same time as his Morphy comments.
Extended discussions of Morphy have been written in books by GM Franco, GM Beim, GM Ward, GM Marin, GM Bo Hansen, GM McDonald, Garry Kasparov (with Dmitry Plisetsky), and GM Gormally. Anyone see any of them express the view that we should accept Fischer's conclusion about Morphy? There seems to be general agreement that Morphy was, as GM Fine put it, one of the giants of chess history, but that is a long way from saying that he was better than anyone playing today.
"... Morphy became to millions ... the greatest chess master of all time. But if we examine Morphy's record and games critically, we cannot justify such extravaganza. And we are compelled to speak of it as the Morphy myth. ... [Of the 55 tournament and match games, few] can by any stretch be called brilliant. ... He could combine as well as anybody, but he also knew under what circumstances combinations were possible - and in that respect he was twenty years ahead of his time. ... [Morphy's] real abilities were hardly able to be tested. ... We do not see sustained masterpieces; rather flashes of genius. The titanic struggles of the kind we see today [Morphy] could not produce because he lacked the opposition. ... Anderssen could attack brilliantly but had an inadequate understanding of its positional basis. Morphy knew not only how to attack but also when - and that is why he won. ... Even if the myth has been destroyed, Morphy remains one of the giants of chess history. ..." - GM Reuben Fine
Carlsen-2961 Kramnik-2868 Kasparov-2816 Fischer-2775 Anand-2759 Karpov-2698 Capablanca-2664 Tal-2636 Spassky-2619 Smyslov-2618 Botvinnik-2602 Euwe-2547 Alekhine-2547 Petrosian-2543 Lasker-2498 Morphy-2409 Steinitz-2323
https://www.chess.com/article/view/who-was-the-best-world-chess-champion-in-history
https://www.chess.com/article/view/should-we-trust-computers
Probably Magnus Carlsen. He had a winning streak of 120 games.
Jul 4, 2020
0
#67
Ponz111 is absolutly legitimate. For the doubters: http://www.iccfus.com/crosstables/usccc_finals/uscccf07.htm
obviously ALPHAZERO, it plays chess so its a chess player
Jul 4, 2020
0
#69
Over the course of the 8 years of this thread, nobody figured out who had the best ratio?
Clearly it's some nut job that never had any interest in chess, played one rated game in their life, won it, and retired!
100 PERCENT!!!!!!!
Alas, that could have been me ... but unfortunately, I had enough interest in chess to play all 5 games in my very first OTB rated tournament.
alpha zero of course
nah!!!!!!!!!! its Shiro and Sora