Top 10 attacking players.

Who do you think were the top 10 attacking players of all time?

yay, cainite is in our group, and how do u do the daily puzzles now? i click then it brings me to chess forums

Petrosian....just kidding.....I don't have much else to add besides Morphy and Tal....are there any stories of a player literally attacking another player at the board?  I would vote for them too then.

1. Fischer

2. Kasparov

3.Tal

4. Alekhine

5. Morphy

and then I don't know...

Sopiko Guramishvili

Levenfish

Gary Kasparov, Bobby Fischer, Viswanathan Anand, Alexander Morozevich, Alexei Shirov, Mikhail Tal, David Bronstein, Alexander Alekhine, Paul Morphy and Adolf Anderssen

For a moment I thought you had said Adolf Hitler!

Hitler and Lenin

I would add Judit Polgar to this list.

Short once said: "Judit "smells" mate 20 moves in advance!"

Keep in mind, people make the misconception that positional = defensive and tactical = agressive/attacking, which is completely false, and just because you are a positional player doesn't mean you aren't an attacking player!  In essence, it's the top 10 at playing White.

That said, my humble opinion of the top 10 attacking players of all time:

1) Kasparov

2) Karpov (An excellent attacker even though it didn't feature the fireworks of Kasparov's games)

3) Anand

4) Alekhine

5) Fischer

6) Carlsen

7) Shirov

8) Botvinnik

9) Judit Polgar

10) Morozevich/Nakamura (toss up)

Tal doesn't make the list because his play was too unsound and erratic.  I don't base grades on results.  A player with 5 brilliant wins and a loss to me is better than a player with 6 wins, all of which involved burning bridges, and should have all been lost with correct play by the opponent.

Morphy doesn't make the list because I think he's highly overrated simply because there was no competition around him.  It's like the Cleveland Browns taking on the top High School football team in each county in Ohio.  The Cleveland Browns are far better than any ordinary player on the street, and better than any highschool team, but they aren't the elite of the professionals out there!

Capablanca doesn't make the list because he played a lot of second best moves just to keep the position simple.  Don't believe me?  Check out My Great Predecessors I

1.) Ulf Anderson

Andersson, Trifunovic, Leko, Petrosian, Flohr, Steinitz, Staunton, Euwe, Smyslov and of course Velimirovic. I will go to sleep now, if you'll excuse me.

Now we know why they call you crazy chess player.  Well at least Velimirovic was an attacker, and Steinitz when he was young.  Euwe had a strange style - classical and tactical.

You forgot Averbach

Petrosian, Steinitz and Smyslov were mainly positional player not attacker! (See Fischer's comment to his game with Petrosian titled "Bear Hug": 'I was amazed during the game. Each time Petrosian achieved a good position, he managed to manoeuvre into a better one.'

ThrillerFan: 2) Karpov (An excellent attacker even though it didn't feature the fireworks of Kasparov's games)

Karpov too, is a typical positional player! (Of course Karpov could attack from a very solid position but this are the main characteristics for a positional player!)

Tal on the other hand is an attacker! Timman was an attacker as well.

Oh.

Crazychessplaya is such a kidder!

Uhm, Positional and Attacking are not opposites, nor mutually exclusive.

You have Positional and Tactical, Attacking and Defensive.

So yes, Karpov was a positional player, but he was also a Top 10 Attacker, contrary to say, Petrosian, who was a Positional Defender.

For Petrosian, safety of his own King came first.  For Karpov, it was all about getting at his opponent's King.  How he went about his "Attack" was in a "Positional" manner.

So as already stated before, POSITIONAL DOES NOT MEAN THE OPPOSITE OF ATTACKING, and YES, there are POSITIONAL PLAYERS that belong in the TOP TEN ATTACKING PLAYERS LIST! 

It's the players where Defense came first that don't belong here, like Korchnoi and Petrosian.  Korchnoi was the opposite of Karpov, a tactical defender!