How great is Nepo?

Most greatest ever lists are topped by the (”real”) World Champions plus Morphy. The one made by GMs Nielsen and Gustafsson at Chess24 is no exception. Now what if Nepo beats Carlsen, where would you rank him among the greatest? Or, if he loses? They placed for example Nimzo, Karjakin, Winawer and Leko in the 40s, but Shirov and Short outside the top 50. Where does Nepo belong, and why?

Among Nepo’s achievements are a bunch of tournament wins, for example Dortmund, Tal Memorial, a couple of Russian Superfinals, of course the Candidates, etc. Maybe not an outstanding list compared to some of his contemporaries. And even if for example Kramnik never won the Candidates or Russian Superfinal, he had a long list of top tournament wins at 30.

Nepo does have very impressive head to head stats against World Champions. His 4-1 in wins against Carlsen has been mentioned rather often, even if some of the wins are far back in time. However, he is also 5-4 against Kramnik and 3-2 against Anand. He never played Kasparov and Karpov in classical, but has a plus score against both in rapid. Which maybe is less surprising, against Carlsen, Kramnik and Anand he was the lower rated player.

Nepo also has a plus score against Caruana, after winning the only decisive game they played since their first against each other in 2006.

people mix up greatness, importance, and actual playing strength all the time. actual playing strength lists would be consisted of people like, magnus, ivanchuck (at his best), kasparov, kramnik, anand, karpov, nepo (at his best), caruana (at his best), shirov (at his best), leko, (at his best), fischer, topalov, spassky (at his best), korchnoi, tal at his prime, leonid stein, MVL (at his best), hikaru, and on.

U cant really add players weaker than botvinnik to this list, tbh, because it becomes unfair and almost factually wrong.

Quite a few players suffer from the "either really strong or just ur normal 2600 rated GM" syndrome like Nepo does. Ivanchuck can come to mind, even Magnus can be inconsistent. MVL, Spassky, Caruana, Ding as of late, and Mamedyarov a little bit. But with age comes consistency, like we see with Hikaru and Nepo now. MVL too has been quite strong, and so has Welsey as well. Players apparently peak at their 30s, but can quite often have bad years between their early 20s and 30s, like we kinda saw happen with Magnus, some times this and last year.

These sorts of rankings show how much depends on one single event in some cases. Euwe is #17 at Chess24 but if he hadn’t been given the match in 1935 it is not certain he would be top 50. There are good reasons to rank Short ahead of Nepo, and still Short isn’t top 50. But if Nepo would beat Carlsen he would be ranked at least around Euwe.

At the moment Nepo has been a top 10 player for no more than two years, but of course beating Carlsen in a title match would be some achievement.

Title matches tend to be rather even. Both players prepare their openings with their teams for quite a while, and often it ends up like Kramnik-Leko, Anand-Gelfand or Carlsen-Karjakin. I do think Carlsen will do better this time than in his two latest title matches, but if Euwe could beat Alekhine and Kramnik could beat Kasparov...

true. both have lots of time to think, prepare, concentrate, defend, attack, etc etc, so they are rarely one sided. only a few come to mind, and that is because they were circumstantial mismatches.

I’d say Nepo today wouldn’t belong among the highest ranked challengers, like Korchnoi and Caruana. Two years as top ten, never anywhere close to the top two, comparatively few top tournament wins etc. Maybe a bit like Short, who did beat Karpov in a Candidates match and won a bunch of top events but never was that high on the rating list.

If Nepo would win the title match, I don’t think he would be ranked among the greatest World Champions unless he combined it with continued top result. Maybe close to Euwe.

Nepo has a decent chance to dethrone Carlsen.
Match play is different from tournament play.
If you win one game and draw all other games, then you win a match, but you end up in the mid of a tournament.

Also, if one player is in bad form and doing worse than you in a match, you win, while you have to do better than all other players to win a tournament.

Actually not only World Champions Nepo has been doing well against, he doesn’t have a minus against frequent players in the top ten of the rating list like Aronian, Mamedyarov, Caruana, Giri, Grischuk, Ding Liren... Good stats for a player that reached top ten for the first time in February 2019. Only So and MVL really seem to have come to grips with Nepo of all top players past and present, but they sure have been doing well against him, being 5-1 and 6-1 up.

At the moment he's just a fabel haf to wait and see what happens.

Nepo is 4th in the world, I believe.

Yes, even if that is the highest he ever has been. The only other challenger (unified title) never to have been top three is Karjakin. He had won a bunch of top events with Carlsen in them, though, like Norway Chess twice and Wijk once. Nepo never won a tournament with Carlsen in it, and has a slightly less impressive list of tournament victories. The top five since 2010 are Tal Memorial 0.5 ahead of Giri, Candidates 0.5 ahead of MVL, Dortmund with Kovalev, Duda and Giri sharing second, and two Russian Championships ahead of Karjakin.

During the split years Leko was a challenger to never reach the top three, but he had won some top events like Linares, Wijk, and Dortmund a few times back in the day when the event was quite strong. 

I see.