Fischer had the best 2 years in a row EVER!!! Prove me wrong.

Yes

After reading all the behind the scenes drama, the whole Soviet prep for Fischer era seems like a movie.

The national pride was at stake, especially after losing the race to the moon.

NM SamCopeland has a new blog in which he ranks great players, past and present, into "tiers" by certain criteria.

He puts Fischer in the top tier, "Gods of Chess," ahead of Kasparov, Morphy, Carlsen, and Capablanca.  Copeland's reasoning is that Fischer far outclssed his contemporaries.

Listening to what Copeland said, I found it a bit surprising that he considered Kramnik unlucky. He meant that if the title hadn't been split he would both have won the title and dominated the whole decade... But I think the way he got that title match was lucky, and throughout the whole decade he at best shared first on one single rating list. Hard for me to see him as such a dominant force.

Botvinnik I rather think he underestimated, saying that he never was clearly best when compared to players like Smyslov and Bronstein. But Botvinnik was insanely strong throughout the 1940s, the Soviet Championship was tough in those days, and he scored +14-0=4 in 1945 and was in a class of his own also in the 1948 World Championship. 

The fact that he talks about higher and lower ranking sounds as if he means that the tiers are ranked from "better" to "worse" and in that respect having Nakamura higher than players like Botvinnik, Smyslov, Spassky, Petrosian feels a bit strange...

I think Nakamura's ranking is heavily influenced by his success in rapid games.

When Fischer decisively won the double round robin blitz tournament at Herceg Novi - blowing away the field, which included Tal, Petrosian, and Korchnoi - it opened a few eyes!

Naka just doesn’t belong on such lists... Shared tenth, ahead of six undisputed World Champions :-) He did qualify for the Candidates once and finished 7th of 8 on tiebreaks, but if I made a list of the ten greatest currently active players I wouldn’t have him in the top ten, even less so on some sort of greatest ever list :-)

Nezhmetdinov is another player I find overrated. Yes, he played some fun games, but he wasn’t one of the 20 best players in the world at any time according to Chessmetrics. He played some Soviet Championships and usually finished in the bottom of the field, after a couple of pretty wins and a bunch of losses. A very strong player of course, but not one to rank ahead of a bunch of World Champions.

It’s one thing if one makes a list of favourite players or something like that, but then I doubt it would include all Soviet top players of the past and Euwe :-) And please don’t pronounce it Oive :-)

I always thought Euwe was pronounced e(r)-vah

I thought Euwe was pronounced you-wee

We are close.

I'd always pronounced it like that too (mentally, when studying old books), but apparently I had it wrong.

Same

There are some youtube videos of of Max Euwe from the 1930s, around the time he defeated Alekhine.  You can hear his name pronounced.

Max "Who we" 

The reason Botvinnik didn't thrash Bronstein in 1951 was that he hadn't played a competitive game in three years (he was busy completing his doctorate in electro-engineering). Throughout his time as World Champion, Botvinnik was to all intents and purposes an amateur. He didn't play sufficiently frequently, and had he worked as hard on his chess in the 1950s as he did in the 30s and 40s, he wouldn't have drawn and lost against Smyslov in '54 and '57.

Sadly, Sam Copeland's list is utterly ridiculous.