Gioachino Greco's rating

Where or when did Greco claim these were played games?

I think a lot of people are bringing modern assumptions to seventeenth century game scores.

?

Is there an available English edition of Greco's work?

That's the problem.  The origin of the games/positions is Greco's mss are conjecture.  Most likely he took opening traps he'd seen played, or deduced himself and built games around them for pecuniary purposes.  But it's all guesswork and as such, really doesn't matter. 

You might try "The Games of Greco" by Prof. Louis Hoffmann and J.‎A. Leon, 1900. 

and some good music!

Very few of us here would stand a chance against Greco. The dude was a monster.

I ran his games through PGN Spy a while back.  The sample size is small, and there are some significant question marks (for example, how much time did he spend on the moves in an era before chess clocks?), but in general, his games got numbers roughly similar to those achieved in OTB play at slow time controls by modern players rated about 2000.

This would indicate that he was probably comfortably below master level, but unless you caught him out with modern opening theory, he would have been a very dangerous opponent for a modern club-level player.

Or, rather, his targeted students for whom he made up the illustrative games were about 2000.

The games are made up. Of course the tactics are primitive. They are the first sustained tactical sequences in the historical record.

This sounds like my sort of discussion. How did I miss this?! All the Greco-heads are here already.

My impression of Greco is that he had a very small knowledge base to learn from, and (perhaps even worse) inferior competition to train against. "Pawns are the soul of chess" was a century away, and Steinitz another century after that. 

All signs point to Greco having crushed his opposition- he made a fortune in Paris, lost it, then apparently won back so much that his eventual donation to the Jesuits was notable even if we don't have any record of his death otherwise. It's possible that after visiting Rome, Paris, Madrid, and London there wasn't much competition left for him. I'd bet he was the strongest player of his day, perhaps by a significant margin.

If you look at his games, they look most like a player toying with much-worse opponent. NN plays terribly, and "Greco" seems to want to win in the most spectacular way possible. As pure speculation, I'd say that Greco actually played the games but that they're not his "best" as he would have played against the chess elite, merely his most exciting for his patrons.

If I'm right, you can't really estimate Greco's strength from his games. But we could go a priori, and ask- how strong could a Morphy-level (say) talent become with weak competition and no study materials? I don't know. Maybe 1800-2000 strength (I'm told that's about as far as you can get without positional knowledge). An entirely different question is how strong he could have become if he were born in 2019, but that's well outside my already-strained expertise.

(Also, after a rereading of this thread I realize I haven't added much. Happens sometimes when you're out of your depth).

Wait. Better answer.

Greco is GOAT, and Greco is me.

That should be in the Norton Anthology of literature.

Or possibly here:

Greco is the giant on whose shoulders the others have stood.

It is impossible to tell grecos rating because of the lack of theory at the time. I have seen 2200s play and none of them would calculate the mating brilliancies that are in Grecos games. But I have seen 1600s who would never make the positional errors that greco does. I would estimate his tactical and calculation strength to be over 2700. But due to his lack of knowledge of other concepts which are considered basic today, his playing strength would probably be that of a weak IM, about 2350.

Once again, model games that were designed for instructive purposes do not give you an example of a player's skill.

A chess rating is always in terms of a particular pool of players. It's not a measure of absolute chess skill, it measures your success in relation to your rating pool. In Greco's case, there really isn't a "rating pool" Tournaments were almost non-existent then and matches were very rare. The strongest players often never met because of the difficulties of travel. It seems clear that Greco was one of the strongest players in the world in his day, but I don't think there's enough data to even try for a rating

Of course they do: even if the games were composed it still has a huge correlation with Grecos playing strength. No 2000 rated player could compose those games off the top of their heads. Greco did this before any of those well known traps and patterns were known to the world. That shows immense tactical ability. At least GM strength or stronger.

I should be more clear. The mistakes in model games do not reflect the player’s weaknesses. He was composing games that illustrate how to exploit typical errors.

On the other hand, some of his games reveal errors on both sides. Perhaps careful analysis of the patterns of such errors could tell us something. But as noted by several others here, ratings are only sensible within a pool of players. Greco had no peers.

(I see that I’m not really disagreeing with you. But, I’m wary of the numbers.)