an educated guess
Gioachino Greco's rating
Educated or not, what does "2300 ish" even mean. Are you saying that among his contemporaries Greco would have been rated 2300? Who were those contemporaries? What were their ratings?
Ratings measure one thing--competitive results. In an age where tournaments were basically non-existent, and matches extremely rare, there is simply no way to assign any kind of numerical rating.
Adjusted for inflation, could it be argued that Greco is one of the greatest players of all time? (Along with Morphy, Kasparov, Fischer, Capablanca etc.) He seems to have roundly crushed players from all across the world in his era.
From chessgames.com and what Leon wrote in 1900, he is said to have visited London, Rome and Paris and even outside of his brilliant compositions and manuscripts, is generally regarded as the strongest player of his time.
probably 2700 rated
Nope, chess has come a long way since Greco's time.
Now, if you were to give him ten years to study modern chess, train with engines, etc., who knows? Maybe 2700 would be plausible.
The Chessmetrics approach to calculate rating backwards in time from available games does not work, as the opponents of Greco are unknown persons.
I would guess around 2000.
https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1997365
No one can estimate Greco’s rating because we know very little about his play. Even his games are composed games that illustrate common tactical ideas and checkmate patterns. Much of what we know of him through his games was copied from others and then extended.
billwall, if you have studied his games, how would you estimate his rating (assuming he actually played in like that) was? 1000? 1500? 2000? 2500? Or something else? What's your best guess?
2400
Educated or not, what does "2300 ish" even mean. Are you saying that among his contemporaries Greco would have been rated 2300? Who were those contemporaries? What were their ratings?
Ratings measure one thing--competitive results. In an age where tournaments were basically non-existent, and matches extremely rare, there is simply no way to assign any kind of numerical rating.
sure there is. Imagine a scenario where greco were revived and invited to a chess tournament after playing 50 games or so to learn how the clock works. Which categories of the tournaments would he win? u1200? u1400? u2000? where would he get trounced.
You see how he has played and extrapolate from there based on what he will likely miss and surely didnt know.
Some players from the past have some surprising high strength in chess. I can tell for Greco but see Philidor: he was able to beat people in simultaneous blindfold exhibitions (vs 2 or 3 players I think). This is amazing considering there were literally no training tools available (tactic training books, theory, not to mention computers).
How would he do today? I'm sure he'd above 2000...
Its harder to calculate because of the different time periods